Broken Pixel

There is one broken pixel in this room.

It flickers — white to black — every ten seconds, or every thirty. Then it holds perfectly still and lets you wonder whether you saw it at all.

It could be on the far wall. It could be a metre from your face. It could have been behind you for the last nine minutes.

You have a toothpick.

That is the entire game

Find the pixel. Poke it. A door opens. Go down.

Nothing about that rule ever changes. Only the size of the haystack.

The first room is a room. The fourth is four rooms. By the twentieth you are somewhere with no business existing — a gallery hung with paintings, a stadium at night, fifty identical white rooms with fifty identical doors, a carousel of televisions turning slowly in the dark. The pixel gets smaller. The rooms get larger. The lights get less dependable.

Eventually somebody hands you a pair of binoculars, points at a city, and tells you it is out there somewhere.

It will teach you to be patient, and then charge you for it

Some pixels are stuck dead and never flicker at all, so the wall fills up with things that look exactly like your answer. One of them hides the instant you look straight at it, and can only be caught slightly out of the corner of your eye. Some are on screens that are moving. Some are on screens that are asleep.

You will learn to sweep slowly. You will learn to watch the edges of the frame. You will learn, eventually, that the magnifying glass is not always on your side.

Somebody is talking to you

A voice tells you about the rooms while you search. Where screens came from. What phosphor is. Why a pixel dies, and what it means that this one has not finished dying yet.

It is calm, and unhurried, and it has been doing this for a very long time.

It also notices what you are doing. It has opinions about how long you have been standing there.

Bring people, if you like

Up to eight of you in the same generated building, on the same seed, hunting the same pixel — racing, or in squads, with a drawer full of ways to make it worse for everybody else.

And if you want to be hunted

There is a switch. It is off. You never have to touch it.

Turn it on and the room begins keeping score of your mistakes. Every wrong poke. Every time you reach for a tool. When it has counted enough of them, something comes out of the wall — and the next count is shorter.

There are nine of them, and they do not want the same things. One will not move while you are watching it. One will not let you stop watching it. One takes the lights with it when it goes.

You will meet them one at a time. Later, not one at a time.

Alone, nobody comes to get you out. And the calm voice stops being the one doing the talking.

Over sixty rooms. Then more you have to earn.

Every room, screen, painting, stadium and skyline is generated, so nobody can tell you where it is. Forty original lounge tracks play while you look. There is a clock, if you want one — and a difficulty where it is watching you.

Take as long as you need.

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The honest version

Everything above is true. So is this.

One pixel in the room is broken. Find it. Poke it. Next room. Over sixty times.

That is the whole game. If it already sounds thin, stop here — it does not open up later.

What actually happens is this.

One screen, one fixed stare, and your eyes quit long before the levels do. That isn't pacing. That's a limit I couldn't design my way around.

So you'll want other people. Eight of you can share one clock. Sourcing seven friends is not included in the price. That's a you problem.

Then one of them finds it before you do and something small dies. You'll say luck. It wasn't luck. And you'll start doing quiet arithmetic about your own eyes — whether they were always this bad, or whether this is new, or whether it's been happening for years and this is simply the first thing that ever bothered to measure it.

Then you spot it. Bottom left. Certain.

Dust.

You clean the monitor. Eleven good seconds. Then you spot the next one, certain again, and you poke it — and it's a fake pixel your friend planted there for exactly this purpose. Frozen and blinded for ten seconds while they walk past you and win.

Some levels are seeded with permanently dead pixels. Always black, never flickering, worth nothing. One has fifteen. The level I actually named The Decoys has six. I still fall for both.

Eventually I asked my girlfriend for help — the same girlfriend I'd spent a week shushing so I could hear the audio cue. She leaned in, looked hard, and pointed at dust. Then more dust. Exactly what I'd been doing for sixty-odd levels, at the same hit rate, for a fraction of the effort. That was the low point of development.

Then my eyes gave out and I stopped.

Straight answer: I can't finish this on Brutal. Brutal only lights what falls inside your flashlight beam. There is a message in the code congratulating you for beating it. I have never seen that message. I wrote it.

So here is the offer, and it is for one person only. The first player to finish Brutal without cheating, and send us the full gameplay recording by email, gets something real. The game knows the difference — a save that has touched a cheat gets flagged and loses its achievements for good, so there is no arguing about it. If you are in our city, dinner is on me. If you are not, you get a free copy of whatever we make next. I think that is a fair trade for something I could not do myself.

The best thing this game has done for me is make me clean my screen.

Which is how I found the dead pixel on my laptop. Years old. Four inches from my face. I built a game about finding these and needed sixty-odd levels of practice before I noticed the real one — and that one doesn't come off.

It's frustrating. I'm getting old. Both are load-bearing.

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Bring your glasses. Clean Your Screen.