Beamwork

Beamwork is a free browser logic puzzle about bending light. A single beam leaves the emitter in a straight line and does exactly one thing: it goes until something stops it. Everything interesting comes from what you put in its way. Forty-eight stages hand you a small stock of parts and one question — can you read the room and see the path before you place anything?

The first verb is the mirror. Tap an empty cell on the beam and a diagonal drops in; tap it again and it flips to the other diagonal; tap once more and it goes back into stock. Because the beam redraws instantly, the puzzle is never about fiddling — you see the whole consequence of a placement the moment you make it, so a wrong answer is cheap and a right answer feels earned rather than lucky.

The campaign runs through four worlds of twelve stages, and each one opens with a new part. The Workshop, under a warm hanging lamp, teaches the mirror against walls, absorbers, portals, glass and bolted mirrors. The Glasshouse brings the splitter at stage thirteen: one beam becomes two, and both halves have to be solved together. Prism Hall brings the prism at stage twenty-five, which breaks white light into red and blue for receivers that only accept one colour. The Observatory, under a sky full of stars, brings the turning mirror at stage thirty-seven.

The room fights back with parts you cannot move. Walls stop the beam dead. Absorbers swallow it, which makes them worse than a wall because they sit exactly where a promising line would carry on. Portals move the beam to their twin while keeping its heading. Glass lets the beam through but slides it one cell sideways. Colour filters pass only their own colour. Energy gates stay shut until their own receiver is lit, which turns one puzzle into two in a fixed order. And the turning mirror faces a different diagonal depending on how far the beam has travelled to reach it, so changing the route earlier changes the turn later.

Some rooms change a rule rather than a number. In the fog stages the board starts dark and only what the beam touches is revealed, so you explore by bending light into the unknown and the map you uncover stays uncovered. A short-supply stage gives you a single mirror and expects the room to do the rest, a twin-source stage fires two emitters that both count, and the vault pays five times the usual coins for lighting everything.

Every stage gives you one more part than the shortest answer needs, so three stars means solving it with a part to spare. If a stage has you stuck, the hint places the next correct part for coins — and if a part you placed is blocking the only route, the hint takes it back instead of piling more on top. A hinted stage can still earn two stars. Coins also buy spare mirrors in the supply screen.

The stage list shows all four worlds with your stars in each, so you can go back for a perfect run at any time, and finishing all forty-eight stages marks the campaign complete. Your stars, coins and progress are saved on your device, so you return to the first stage you have not finished.

Every stage was proved solvable by an exhaustive search before it shipped, and a separate check confirms that a player who only ever follows the hint finishes every stage too. It plays with one thumb on a phone and a mouse or keyboard on desktop, and the whole board fits on screen at once. If you like Beamwork, try Spark Drop or Gridlock next.