TINCT
Change the palette. The room changes with it.
TINCT is a first-person palette puzzle game. It is free to play. You can play it in the browser today. iOS and Android are planned.
A first-person puzzle where the colour palette is the mechanic. A wall's brightness maps to one colour in this palette and another in the next — so swapping palettes makes geometry appear and disappear. The bridge was always there; you just could not see it. Ten rooms free.
The rendering technique is the puzzle.
Every surface in TINCT carries a brightness value, and the palette you are wearing decides what colour that brightness becomes. A stair at brightness 0.47 reads as background in one palette and as pale gold in the next. It never moved. It was never removed. You simply could not see it — and you can still walk into it, because the collision is always there. Bumping into something invisible is a clue, not a bug.
Swipe the palette wheel in the bottom-right to cycle three to five palettes per room. The blend takes 200ms and each palette carries its own harmonic tone, so you learn to hear a room as well as look at it.
Four kinds of puzzle. Visibility: hidden paths, doors and symbols. Interaction: the lever is in one palette and the thing it moves is in another, so you have to hold both in your head. Mechanism: gears, levers and output each live in a different palette. Memory: the map is drawn in one palette and the maze exists in another.
30 rooms across six themes. Observatory (stars and constellations), Greenhouse (plants and light), Clockwork (gears and escapements), Library (text and marginalia), Tide Pool (water levels), Cathedral (stained-glass shadows). Five rooms each, and each room ends on a line that is about the room and also about you.
Ten rooms are free — the whole Observatory and the whole Greenhouse, from First Light through Root Network. That is the complete first two themes, not a slice of one.
There is a thirty-first room. It is not for sale. Six chromatic glyphs are hidden across the six themes, one apiece, and finding all of them opens The Spectrum.
No timer. No pixel-hunting. No running — you walk at about two metres a second, because looking is the verb. Room one teaches the mechanic by discovery and never explains it in text.
What’s included
- Swap the palette and geometry appears — the same wall, a different colour ramp
- 30 rooms across six themes: Observatory, Greenhouse, Clockwork, Library, Tide Pool, Cathedral
- Ten rooms free — the complete Observatory and the complete Greenhouse
- A thirty-first room you cannot buy. Six chromatic glyphs open The Spectrum.
- No timer, no pixel-hunting, no running. Collision works on things you cannot see.
Optional add-ons
- Full Tinct — $5. All 30 rooms — every theme, unlocked permanently.
- Clockwork — $2. Five gear-and-escapement rooms, from First Gear to Grand Complication.
- Library — $2. Five rooms of text and marginalia, from Index to Archive.
- Tide Pool — $2. Five rooms of shifting water levels, from Shallows to Abyss.
- Cathedral — $2. Five rooms of stained-glass shadow, from Narthex to Sanctum.
TINCT is covered by Our Promise: no microtransactions, free updates forever. Refundable for 14 days — just email hello@inlet.games.