Play Glimmerworks • Free

Lighthouse Cove: a cove with a lighthouse whose lamp has gone dark, the keeper's hut and its cellar, a rowboat, lobster pots and crates on the shore. Wake the lamp and the beam sweeps across the sea.

Night Carnival: a midway with a generator shed, a tin-duck shooting gallery, a ticket booth, Madame Zora's fortune machine and a big top. The Grand Wheel, a Ferris wheel with ten cabins, waits for its lamp, its drive and its fuse.

Clocktower Square: a bakery, a clockmaker's shop, a fountain and a post kiosk round a clock tower that stopped years ago. Wind the clock, hang its pendulum and release the brake, and the bells ring out over the square.

Snowpeak Observatory: a mountain top under the aurora, with a cable car station, a weather shed, a radio hut and a keeper's cabin. The great telescope in the dome needs its lens and its motor running.

Glasshouse Garden: a potting shed, four flower beds, a pond and a rose arbour round a great glasshouse. Fit the sun lamp, get the mist pump going, and the whole house blooms.

Moonbase Rocket: a habitat, a rover garage, a comms hut and a solar farm round a rocket on its pad. Load the fuel cell, fix the gyro and arm the launch console for lift-off.

Each place has six levels. The place stays the same, but every level hides a new chain, with different items, clues and locks. The early levels have three or four locks; later ones run to seven or more and add decoy clues that look useful but are not.

Every clue in a level is used, though not always on its own. A code might take its order from a list on one note, its digits from a count you make in the scene, and its symbols from a plaque somewhere else. When a lock has wheels or buttons, count how many it needs: that tells you how long the answer is.

Some clues are things to count, like the cabins on the wheel, the loaves in the bakery window or the stars in a constellation. Others need reading the right way: a note held up to a mirror, a tag hung upside down, a clock reflected in a window, or a number that has to be read backwards, sorted or subtracted.

On levels with a sun and moon button, some clues only show in the dark: glow-in-the-dark paint on a wall, an oar or a bench. Switch to night and look again at places you have already searched. Watch out, too, for a second glowing message that is a decoy.

Every clue you read is kept in the notebook as a small card, page after page, in the order you found them. Tap a card to read it again in full, with its drawing, digits, colours or symbols. The notebook opens over everything else, even over a lock you are working on.

If you are stuck, the bulb button opens a hint card for the step you are on, or for the lock you have open. Each step has three hints: a nudge in the right direction, which clue matters, and finally the answer. They cost 3, 6 and 12 coins. If you run out of coins, a free hint comes ready after two minutes of play, and the bulb glows to show it.

Stars come from how much help you needed: three stars for a level solved with no hints at all, two stars if you used no more than three hints and never bought an answer, and one star otherwise. A star on a level opens the next one.

You start with 30 coins. Each step of the chain that you finish without a hint pays 3 coins, and the stars pay 5, 10 or 20 at the end. Both only pay the first time: replaying a level pays nothing for its steps, and only stars you have not won before add coins.

All the sound is made in code: the click of dial wheels and the clunk of a bolt shooting back, the rustle of clues, a different waking sound for each machine (a foghorn, a calliope, the tower bells, a dome motor, a burst of mist and a rocket's ignition), and the background of each place, from waves and gulls to crickets, mountain wind and the hum of the Moon base. Each place has its own gentle tune that picks up a beat once the machine is running. The speaker button, the pause card or the S key turns it off, and the game follows the site's mute as well.

Your stars on every level, your coins and your sound setting are saved on Unihfy Games in this browser. A level in progress is not saved: leaving it and coming back starts that level again.