INKLIGHT
Read five hidden deed pages in a print works written in invisible ink.
Loading the cartridge (256 KiB)…
Saved states last for this visit. Sound starts with Power.
INKLIGHT needs a keyboard or a game controller. On a phone or tablet without one you can read about the game here, but you can’t play it yet.
1
The cartridge · in the fiction
Logiciels Soupirail's top-down adventure, the 1989 hit that first used the Gel swap. At night the apprentice Aurèle searches a shut Montréal print works for the five pages of a deed written in invisible ink, which only the violet gel on his lamp can show.
- Developer
- Logiciels Soupirail
- Year
- 1989
- Genre
- Action-adventure
- Technique
- gel-swap
2
Controls
| Cyclorama pad | Keyboard | Game controller |
|---|---|---|
| D-pad | Arrow keys | D-pad or left stick |
| A | Z | Bottom face button |
| B | X | Right face button |
| C | C | Left or top face button |
| START | Enter | Start |
| Save state | F5 | — |
| Load state | F8 | — |
| Power off | Escape | — |
Saved states are kept for this visit only. Controllers use the standard layout (Xbox, PlayStation and most USB or Bluetooth pads). Press any button on the controller after powering on so the browser notices it.
3
How to play
After the Curtain Up splash, press Start (keyboard Enter, or a controller's Start button) on the title screen and on each of the two how-to-play pages. Walk Aurèle with the D-pad (arrow keys, or a controller's d-pad or left stick). A or C (keyboard Z or C) stamps with the printer's block, a short lunge. B (keyboard X) slides the violet gel over the lamp and off again, once you have found the gel on the imposing stone next to the front shop. In the lamp's violet pool you see the old master's invisible ink: writing on the walls, secret doors, the ink planks that bridge the broken floors, the deed pages on the floor and the ink creatures. You can only stand on a plank while the violet shows it: take the gel off on a bridge and you fall, which costs oil. A deed page lifts into your hand only when the violet lights it, and a secret door opens when the violet rests on it. Stamp a creature while the violet shows it to knock it out; stamped in daylight it is only pushed away. Serifling patrol; Smudgehounds sleep until the violet wakes them, so let them sleep; a Galleymoth's shadow shows the ink too. Stamp a door's iron bolt to open it. The lamp burns oil (OIL on the status bar), three times as fast with the gel in: oil cans top it up, and an oil drum on each landing fills it and becomes your restart point. Touching a creature also costs oil. When the oil runs out you lose one of your three lives. Find the five pages across the four floors: four of them open the cellar stair, and all five with the violet open the strongroom. Start pauses. After GAME OVER press Start to go back to the title; the win screen stays until the console is reset.
What is running
When you power on, your browser runs an emulator of the Cyclorama: its CPU, its video chip with the light field, and its Cue sound chip, at the real frame rate. The cartridge is the same 256 KiB ROM the project builds and tests, byte for byte.
inklight · 262,144 bytes · SHA-256 4544450a0beae4946d190e60f846c52ac31c6a00977e8c85c01ea2d879139762
No account and no cookies. Apart from its own files, the page loads one script: Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts visits and page speed without cookies. The hardware is documented in full: read the HED-0041 hardware and programmer’s manual and the SCRIM language specification. Or go back to the Cyclorama.