How to play
- Goal
- Deliver every letter in the satchel, and collect the ones waiting at houses, as fast as you can.
- How it ends
- A round ends when the last letter is delivered; calling at the wrong house adds five seconds, and a round cannot be lost.
- Record
- The fastest round on each town, wrong calls included; every finished round counts.
- Open a town and read the satchel before you fly: every letter has an address, and the clock starts only when you press Fly and the countdown ends. An address names what you can see from the air: the roof's colour (red, blue, green or yellow) and the kind of house (a one-storey cottage, a two-storey townhouse, or a tall round tower; "house" alone means any kind). It may also name a place: the house nearest a landmark, one across the river from the relay roost where you start, or one north, east, south or west of a landmark, with north at the top of the map. In the snow, a lit window or a smoking chimney can be part of it. Each address fits exactly one house, and every word in it is needed.
- Fly low over the roof you mean: the roof you can call at is outlined in light and the Call button lights up. Call, and every letter in the satchel for that house is delivered and every letter waiting there is collected; a call at the wrong house adds five seconds to your time. Some letters must be collected from one house before they can go to another. The round ends with the last letter delivered.
- The owl glides on its own; you steer, climb and dive. Diving gathers speed and climbing spends it, and a climb without speed ends in a stall. Beat the wings for a push of speed and height: you have five beats, and one grows back every second and a half while the wings rest. Walls and towers knock speed off, warm smoke over a chimney lifts you, and the mist round the town turns you back. The corner map shows the landmarks, the river and where you are, but never which house a letter means.
Controls
| Stick (drag) · ← → · A D | Steer |
|---|---|
| Stick up / down · ↑ ↓ · W S | Climb and dive |
| Beat (held) · Space · Shift | Beat the wings; hold to keep beating |
| Call · E · Enter | Call at the house below |
| Map · M | The big map (the clock keeps running) |
| R | Restart the town |
| Escape | Pause (the round then no longer counts for the Ten) |
The owl is a warehouse 3D model drawn with three.js; it keeps its skeleton and every wing, leg, tail and head bone is moved from the flight as it happens. The houses and landmarks are built by the game from the same facts its addresses are written from, so a roof is exactly the colour its address names; every town and every address was generated and checked by the game's builder, which proves each address fits exactly one house and flies every town to its last letter. The sounds and fonts come from the Morass warehouse. A round is sent as your controls alone, and the records worker flies it again with the same core before it ranks the time. Your progress and your best round's ghost stay in this browser under morass.owl-night-post.v1. No ads or analytics run inside the game.
Watch how to play
About Owl Night Post
A delivery race in full 3D over a sleeping town at night. You fly the relay's night-post owl from the roost at the edge of town, and the satchel holds the evening's letters. None of them says where its house is: each carries an address, a small riddle such as "the red-roofed cottage nearest the well" or "the yellow-roofed house with a smoking chimney north of the chapel", and exactly one house in town fits it.
There are thirty-two fixed towns in four places, each bringing a new kind of address: a moonlit river village where houses are told by roof and shape and the landmark they stand nearest; a harbour on the sea where some letters wait at one house to be collected and taken to another, and some go across the river; a snowbound town where a lit window or a smoking chimney is part of the address, and the warm smoke lifts the owl; and a town of spires under the aurora where addresses say north, east, south or west of a landmark. The satchel lists the letters in the order they were posted, so the quickest way round is yours to plan.
The owl's wings are driven by the flight itself: a beat is one full stroke, a dive draws the wings back, a turn banks the body and lifts the inner wing, and the talons swing forward as each letter drops. Your fastest round in each town flies beside you as a pale ghost owl, and on this page the record's round flies too, in gold. Each town keeps a Top 10 of the fastest rounds, wrong calls included, and the site flies the whole round again before it keeps a place.
