Lampblack

A stealth game inside somebody's sketchbook. You are a drop of ink spilled on the page, and the guards patrolling it are pencil figures who cannot see shape or motion — only contrast. A dark blot on white paper is glaringly obvious. A dark blot sitting in a hatched shadow, or on one of the artist's heavy contour lines, is invisible.

So the drawing's own linework is your cover, and moving means reading the page for a route along the artist's strokes.

How it plays

• The art is the mechanic, exactly. The darkness under you is sampled from the rendered drawing itself — there is no second, hidden collision map that could disagree with what you can see. Denser hatching is darker, so it is better cover, and it looks it.
• Running spreads you. Creeping is silent and keeps you thin; running is twice the speed and lowers your effective darkness by 0.15, so shading that hid you at a creep will not hide you at a run. Flattening beads you up for a little more darkness, but you cannot move while you do it.
• You cling to ink. Any drawn line is something to crawl along, at any angle — hold toward a steep one and you climb it. The drawing's structure is the platforming.
• Twelve smudges, eight pages. Dragging a streak of new cover from where you stand costs one of twelve for the whole game, so most pages have to be solved with the linework the artist already left you.
• The eraser patrols some pages and rubs the ink out as it goes — including your smudges, and including you. What it leaves behind is brighter than the paper around it, and it is permanent for the rest of the page.
• No HUD tells you whether you are hidden. The blot does: calm and beaded in cover, wobbling nervously when half-seen, wearing a halo of bare white paper when you are in the open.

Every playthrough is a redrawing of the same eight pages — the layouts are authored, the hand that draws them is seeded, so the jitter, pressure and hatch angles are different every time.