How to play
- Goal
- Draw lines that steer the falling glow-dust into every lantern until each one is full.
- How it ends
- A level is won when every lantern is lit, and lost when the dust runs out or settles with a lantern still unlit.
- Record
- The fewest strokes, the least ink and the fastest pour for each level.
- Press and drag on the cavern to draw a line; what you draw is solid, and falling glow-dust slides along it. The free pen paints as you drag; the straight pen draws a straight line from where you press to where you let go. With keys, move a cursor with the arrows and press Enter at each end of a line.
- Nothing moves until you press Pour (Space). Dust slides down lines steeper than about one in eight and piles up on flatter ones, and dust on dust holds at about one in three. The number beside each crack is the dust it has left; the number on a lantern is the dust it still needs, and a full lantern lights and closes. You can keep drawing while the dust falls.
- Tinted panes colour the dust that passes through them, and a tinted lantern takes only its own colour. Where there is a lodestone, Turn (T) turns gravity over, and settled dust tells you how long is left to turn it. The ink number is what you have used and the bar under it what is left; R starts the level again at once.
Controls
| Drag | Draw a line (free or straight pen) |
|---|---|
| Space | Pour |
| Arrows · Enter | Move the cursor · mark each end of a straight line |
| P | Switch between the free and the straight pen |
| T | Turn gravity, where there is a lodestone |
| R | Start the level again |
| Escape | Pause (during the pour, the run no longer counts for a record) |
The cavern backdrops and the stone are warehouse paintings and the sounds warehouse recordings; the lanterns, panes, rings and lines are drawn by the game. A run is sent as its strokes alone, and the records worker pours them again with the same physics before it ranks the result. Your progress stays in this browser under morass.glow-sluice.v1. No ads or analytics run inside the game.
About Glow Sluice
The line-drawing sand puzzle in the Sugar, Sugar tradition, in a cavern under a hill town where moonlight has settled into the rock as glow-dust. It trickles from cracks in the roof; draw lines of moonsilver for it to slide along and fill the lamplighters' lanterns until every one is lit.
The dust is exact. Every grain is whole numbers on a grid, run by a small engine written for this game, so the same drawing always pours the same way in every browser. Nothing moves until you press Pour, so a drawing is planned, not raced, and when a pour goes wrong it was the drawing, and the drawing can be improved.
There are 120 levels in eight groves, each bringing one new thing: several lanterns, rock ledges and overhangs, tinted panes and lanterns that take only their own colour, a lodestone that turns gravity over, a well where dust falling off the bottom comes back in at the top, and mirror rings that carry dust across the cavern. Every level was proved lightable, and each grove runs from its easiest level to its hardest. Each level keeps a Top 10 for the fewest strokes, the least ink and the fastest pour, and the site replays every run before it keeps a place.
