Paper Seasons: Ink Puzzle

Paper Seasons is a quiet puzzle game drawn in ink on paper.

Every board is a picture. What looks like a grid of arrows is a drawing — a lantern, a bicycle, a bay full of sails — and the arrows are the lines it is made of. Clear them all and the drawing underneath comes up whole, with its Vietnamese name.

HOW IT PLAYS
Tap an arrow and it slides the way it points, and off the board — if nothing is in its way. Most of the time something is. So the puzzle is order: which piece can leave now, which piece is waiting on it, and what the board will look like three moves from here. Hold a piece and it shows you the path it would take before you commit to it.

Spinners turn what is next to them. Hold one and it shows you what it will turn, because turning the wrong thing is the mistake that ends a run.

NOTHING HURRIES YOU
The clock on the bar is a stopwatch, not a countdown. There are no lives to run out of, no energy to wait for and no board that expires — a level waits exactly as long as you do, and what it asks for is attention rather than speed. Every level gives you at least three mistakes and three undos, an undo takes back the mistake along with the move, and a mistake costs you nothing outside the level you are in. If you use up your mistakes, the level simply starts again whenever you want it to, free and straight away.

SEASON ONE — VIỆT NAM
500 levels in five chapters, each one a place: Hà Nội, Hạ Long, Huế with Hội An, the Mekong, and Sài Gòn · Tết. Every level is its own drawing of a real place, craft or dish, and every drawing you clear is kept in your collection, where you can open it full size and read what it is. Cầu Trường Tiền, the six arcs of the Perfume River bridge. Bánh lọc, the clear dumplings with the shrimp showing through.

A PUZZLE A DAY
One board a day, the same board for every player, built on your phone from the date. Clear it and your streak grows. It takes a few minutes and then it is done.

HOME VILLAGE
Quê nhà. One ink scene to visit between levels, with a card on each thing in it — what it is, what it is for, and why it looks the way it does.

IT PLAYS OFFLINE
The whole season is on your phone. There is no account, no sign-up, no name and no e-mail: the game never asks you to type anything at all.

Paper Seasons is free to play and supported by advertising. No full-screen ad interrupts a puzzle — none while a board is in play, none on the moment a drawing appears, and nothing is ever forced on you after a level you lost.