Inkfall

A point-and-click adventure set inside a painting. You have an eraser and forty units of erasure for the entire game, and every solution is a subtraction.

Remove the bars of a cage and it is open. Remove the river and you can walk across. Remove a character's shadow and they cannot be followed. Every subtraction is permanent, and the painting gets emptier as you go — the smudge halo left behind never quite disappears, so by the end the scars are the map of your playthrough.

How it plays

• Seven authored scenes, each with more than one way through it at different prices: a lock costs 2, the gate it holds costs 5, the wall the gate is set in costs 8. A frugal player finishes with most of the inkwell left; a spender does not.
• The eraser has ethics. It will not take a living thing, at any budget, and it says so in its own words — a wren, a heron, a watchman, a yew. That refusal is in the first scene on purpose, because it reframes the whole verb before you have spent anything.
• Eight authored consequences. Erase the river in scene 2 and the mill in scene 5 is dry, and its puzzle is a different puzzle. Erase a name and the ending cannot say whose it was.
• Three endings, by how much of the painting is left: Full, Sparse, Blank. The last is not a failure. It is a different, bleaker resolution, and nothing in the game ever tells you that you wasted anything.

Watercolour, generated rather than painted: every mark is an ink outline with a wash sitting slightly off it, on a sheet with its own grain. A second playthrough diverges because you spend your erasure somewhere else.