Anamorph
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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.

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 decoy 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.

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.

Tips for your first few days