Inkfall

Inkfall is a free drawing-physics puzzle you play in the browser. A ball falls, a funnel waits somewhere else on the page, and the only thing between them is a line you draw yourself. That much is a familiar idea. The twist is that your ink is not one substance: before every stroke you pick what the line is made of, and the five inks behave like five genuinely different materials rather than five colours of the same one.

Wood is the plain one — it carries weight, it has ordinary friction, and a wooden ramp does exactly what a ramp looks like it should do. Rubber is a launcher: a ball that lands on it leaves faster than it arrived, and a short rubber lip in the right place will throw the ball across a gap that no ramp could bridge. Ice is nearly frictionless, so the ball keeps almost all its speed along it, but ice melts a few seconds after the ball first touches it — an ice line is a road with an expiry date, and the puzzle becomes about arriving before it is gone. Glass is the cheapest ink on the sheet and it holds fine under a gentle roll, but hit it hard enough and it shatters, which is sometimes the failure and sometimes exactly the plan. A magnet never touches the ball at all: it pulls from a distance, so you place it beside the path rather than under it and bend the fall instead of catching it.

Every level gives you a fixed budget of ink and only some of the five inks to spend it with, and both of those are part of the puzzle. The budget is not a guess — each of the 64 levels ships with a solution the game itself replays before release, and the amount of ink you get is derived from what that solution actually costs, with room to be less efficient than it. Leftover ink is the score: finish with plenty in the tube and you get three stars, scrape in on fumes and you get one. Cutting a line you regret refunds most of its ink, so experimenting is cheap and a bad idea costs a few seconds rather than a restart.

The 64 levels are ordered so that each ink is introduced on its own before it has to work with anything else, and then the board keeps adding pressure: spikes that end the fall, wind that pushes lines and ball alike, platforms that move on their own, levels with two balls and two funnels that both have to be solved by one set of strokes, and finally rooms where gravity points the wrong way and everything you learned reads upside down. There is no timer anywhere, and missing does not end anything — the ball simply resets while your strokes stay on the page, so a run at a hard level is a sequence of small edits rather than a punishment.

Three rules run alongside the inks and change the question a level asks rather than the numbers in it. Ink drops hang in the air and the funnel stays shut until the ball has passed through every one of them, so the target stops being a point and becomes a route. Dry patches are places the paper will not hold ink at all — the ball flies straight through them, but you cannot draw there, so the puzzle turns into where a line is even allowed to exist. And some levels cap you at one or two lines at a time, which makes Cut the way out of a mistake instead of a tidy-up. They arrive early, they mix with every ink, and roughly four out of five levels carry at least one of them.

It plays with one finger on a phone or one hand on a mouse: drag on the paper to draw, tap an ink to switch. Nothing to install, no account, and no purchase. Progress, stars and coins are stored locally on the device, so the levels you have opened are still open tomorrow.