一撇 One Stroke Short

About the Game

A world that was written

The mountain here is the character 山, and a sentence hangs across your path: "there is no road ahead."

You fell out of an unfinished character as a single brushstroke and can't remember which character it was. On this paper all ink is solid: you can stand on words, smash them, split them apart and join them together. Change the word, and you change the thing.

Six ways to make a character, six ways to play

Chinese writing has six traditional principles of character formation. Each volume is built on one of them, and each one plays like a different game.

Pictographs: press a key to slip between today and three thousand years ago. The same character has two bodies: the crossbar of modern 木 opens into branches in its ancient form. You can ride the character for horse and roll the sun when it was still round.


Indicatives: you carry a single dot. Put it above a line and the line means "up", and gravity agrees. Put "up" and "down" together and you get 卡, "stuck", and the game actually starts to stutter. To steal the bell, you mute the game.


Compounds: collect words in a bag and merge them. Sun and moon make light, while three stones give you a stairway. There are more than 70 real recipes, and usually more than one answer. Merge "spear" with "shield" and the game pretends to crash.


Phonetics: use the 1–4 keys to play the four tones of Mandarin. Flat tones lay road, rising tones build ramps, dipping tones launch you, falling tones smash things. One boss fight takes its cues from a tongue twister that uses a single syllable.


Transfers: climb inside the dictionary, where every definition is a law of physics. On the page for "light" you float. The page for "long" barely ends. "Old" and "test" define each other, and you can't get out.


Loans: pull the meaning out of a word, and the narrator can never say it again. Lend that meaning somewhere else, and you can be a fish, a bird, anything.

Outside the page

At the end of each volume you slide off the edge of the paper, onto a real desk. The inkstone rises like a mountain above the teacup lake. Follow the sticky notes to find your way.

An old man sits at the desk and writes slowly. Every time you come back, there are more notes on the wall.

Also inside

• Landscapes made of writing, with 山 for mountains and 木 for trees
  
• Hand-drawn oracle bone script, three thousand years old, that runs, flies and swims
  
• Playable Chinese fables: marking the boat to find the sword, waiting by the stump for a rabbit, calling a deer a horse
  
• Every word you learn goes into your dictionary, and becomes your ink
  
• You write the last stroke of the game yourself, by hand. It stays on the title screen, and no two are alike
  
• Stuck? Press H for a hint, or skip any section

You don't need to know Chinese

The characters stay Chinese, because the characters are the puzzles, but every one of them comes with its meaning beside it.