Anamorph
← Home

How to play

Anamorph is one puzzle a day, solved with one gesture. Everyone in the world gets the same puzzle, and it changes at midnight UTC.

Drag to move around the cloud. The picture only appears from one direction, and the glow tells you when you are close.

Start with the tutorial

The daily puzzle is meant to be hard, and it is a blunt way to meet the mechanic for the first time. The tutorial is four short rounds that build up to it: the first opens a few degrees from the answer with a clear shape and almost nothing else in the cloud, and each one after it starts further away, narrows the angle you have to land in, and fills the cloud in a little more. The fourth is a real easy round. Tries are unlimited throughout, a line of guidance follows you as you turn, and solving a round moves you straight on to the next. It takes a few minutes, it never touches your streak, and you can pick it up again where you left off from the ? button in the corner of the game.

After that, free play is the place to keep going: unlimited fresh puzzles, starting on easy, with medium and hard there when you want them. The daily puzzle is the harder one, and it is the only one that counts towards a streak.

What you are looking at

The screen shows a cloud of flat fragments floating in 3D space. Each one sits at its own distance from you and is tilted at its own angle, so from almost any direction they are meaningless shards with no pattern in them.

From exactly one viewpoint, they line up into a single picture: an animal, an object, a recognisable silhouette. Your whole job is to find that viewpoint.

This is the same idea as anamorphic pavement art, where a painting stretched across a street only looks correct when you stand on one particular paving stone. The distortion is not a trick of the drawing, it is a consequence of where you are standing.

The one gesture

Drag anywhere on the screen to orbit the cloud. Dragging left and right swings you around it, dragging up and down raises and lowers you. On a keyboard, the arrow keys nudge, and holding shift makes them much finer for the last small adjustments.

There is no zoom and no pan. The answer is a direction, not a position, so orbiting is the only control you need.

Reading the cloud

The fragments brighten and a soft glow rises as you get close to the answer. That glow is the only feedback in the game, and it is deliberately limited: it tells you that you are near, never which way to turn. Getting closer is your judgment.

Because the target is a shape rather than a word, a near miss is still informative. At eighty percent aligned you will often see something that looks almost like an object, which is the signal to slow down and make small movements rather than large ones.

Not every fragment is part of the picture. The cloud is padded with loose shards that are built from the same material and brighten in exactly the same way, so you cannot pick out the real ones and read the answer off them.

Three locks

When you believe you have found the angle, lock in. You get three locks per day, shown as three dots at the bottom of the screen.

A lock is either right or wrong, and a wrong one tells you nothing beyond the fact that it was wrong. There is no warmer or colder, and no distance readout. Deciding when you are confident enough to spend a lock is the real difficulty of the game.

One of the three can be traded for a hint instead. Take it and every real fragment lights up for a few seconds, which separates the picture from the loose shards without saying where to stand. It can be used once, and not on your last lock.

Spend all three without finding it and the camera flies to the answer, so you always get to see what you were hunting for.

Streaks

Solve the daily puzzle and your streak goes up by one. Miss a day, or run out of locks, and it goes back to zero. Your streak is stored in your own browser, so clearing your browser data or switching to a different device will start it again.

Free play, and where the difficulty lives

The daily is one puzzle, and when it is done it is done. Free play is the endless version: fresh puzzles, as many as you want, with no effect on your streak. It is reached from the result screen, or from the home page once the day is finished.

It is also the only place you choose a difficulty. Medium hides one false alignment in the cloud and hard hides three: other angles where a set of pieces genuinely gathers, but into a smudge rather than a shape, so pieces coming together is no longer proof that you have arrived. Easy has none of them, and its pieces brighten more as you close in. The daily gives every player the same puzzle at the same difficulty, which is what makes one streak comparable with another, so the choice belongs to the mode where nothing is being counted.

Tips for your first few days