Longlight

You are a lighthouse keeper walking the same coastal path at dusk, seven times. Walking is the only verb. Your lamp casts a cone across the landscape, and somewhere out there — never in the obvious place — is one memory, playing out in silhouette. Hold the light on it for a moment and it begins.

And each walk, the cliff has taken more of the path. The ground you started from last time is a drop now.

How it plays

• Seven walks, ten to thirteen minutes, no fail state and no puzzles. The searching is the whole task.
• One memory per walk, and it can be missed. Reach the light without finding it and the night takes it. There is no replay of a missed walk.
• The path shortens every walk — a long unhurried search first, a few dozen steps by the seventh. Each walk opens by showing you its length ahead as a faint line, so you can see it is shorter than last time.
• What you lose stays visible. Memory sites sit at fixed places along the coast, so as the path retreats the early ones end up out past its edge — you can still see where walk two's memory happened, on ground you can no longer stand on.
• The lighthouse sweeps once at the end of every walk, and for three seconds it shows you everything in the landscape, found and unfound. A reward and a taunt.
• Three endings, by how much of it you found. A partial collection is a real ending, not a failure.

Pure black shapes against a graded dusk sky, with the lamp as the only light — the sky is later in the evening every walk, so the seventh is nearly night. Depth comes from layered silhouettes and distance, and the wind and the sea are most of the soundtrack. When a memory begins, the wind drops.