The honest version

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.

[hr][/hr]

Bring your glasses. Clean Your Screen.