Different Light
Nov 1, 2026 · A daily island mystery where every art style is a lens, and each one shows a clue the others can't.
Different Light is a daily mystery on one small island. Each day something has gone wrong on Pebble Isle: the lighthouse lamp is gone, the fair's cash tin is empty, somebody painted Gus's boat pink overnight. By daylight nothing looks out of place. To find out who did it, you change how the island is drawn.
Every art style is a lens with one rule. Low-poly is the plain present, where you can talk to the islanders. Liminal turns the island pale and empty and shows what's missing. Watercolour makes wet things bleed, so footprints from the dock appear. Blueprint shows structure, so the hidden cellar under the bait shop shows up. 1-bit shows only warm, living things, through walls. Some looks are recordings: the CRT look is the dock's security camera, with a night you can scrub through (check its clock). Others are memories, like the toon look, which is how seven-year-old Pip remembers the fair, and memories can be wrong. There are nineteen looks so far, from clay fingerprints and pixel-art pockets to neon wiring, a ballpoint logbook and the island at midnight.
Swapping is free, but your score is how few swaps you needed before naming the right person, and you get three guesses. The share row is your solving path, one emoji per look, and the share picture cuts the island into the looks you used, with the clue words blacked out so it doesn't spoil the case. There are sixteen hand-made cases. The daily follows the week, easy on Monday and Tuesday and hard at the weekend, with a lying witness or a logbook that doesn't add up. Each case you solve adds a look to your album, and some cases hide an extra clue that only a look you've already earned can see.
The idea is Jeff's: the studio keeps a catalogue of art styles, every style drawn on the same little island, to describe what our games look like, and he wondered what would happen if switching between them was the game. It's built with three.js and no game engine. It uses one renderer and one island, and a swap re-dresses every object with that look's materials, light and screen effect in a few milliseconds, behind a wipe. It works on a phone with a finger, or with a mouse and keys or a gamepad. The promo above was filmed from the real game, solving the first case.