Self-Guided Tours in Chicago

Chicago's self-guided routes turn its parks into film sets rather than sightseeing loops. One drops a player into Lincoln Park on Halloween chasing a dating-app stranger, solving codes at a mausoleum that survived the Great Fire, at Lincoln's own monument, and near the zoo where Victorian-era ghosts are still reported by staff. The other casts the walker as an art thief fleeing the Art Institute with a stolen Hopper, working Millennium and Grant Park through Cloud Gate, Crown Fountain, the BP Bridge and Buckingham Fountain, with real history folded in: Calder's final sculpture, Gehry's mayoral pitch, and a sculptor once pulled from an Illinois coal mine.

Both run through the Questo app: a booking code unlocks it, the ghost game starts at the Chicago History Museum, and clues and a map guide the walk stop by stop with no guide needed. The Lincoln Park game plays best after dark and works for a couple or a team of up to three sharing one phone; the art heist runs fourteen stops over about ninety minutes and reads fine in daylight. Neither has a fixed start time, and either costs about what a Chicago deep-dish lunch would.

Practical. Chicago's winters bite harder than the numbers suggest: January highs average only around 1C, and wind off the lake cuts through a coat that would be fine inland. July regularly reaches 29C, and lake humidity makes shade matter along both parks. The ghost game covers 2.7 kilometres through Lincoln Park after dark, so a charged phone and a downloaded map matter more than daylight ever would; the heist covers 3.4 flatter, better-lit kilometres through Millennium and Grant Park. Neither route sells out or needs booking ahead.