Glow

Puzzle · plays in your browser, no download

Where it comes from

The skincare game, which arrived on phones around 2021 and sits in the same family as the videos people watch to fall asleep: the pleasure is in the wiping, not in the winning. The shape is older than the phones — it is a scratch card, and the oldest trick in a fairground: something is already underneath, and your hand uncovers it.

How to play

Three tools at the bottom, and each one does one thing. Touch a tool to pick it up; on a keyboard, 1, 2 and 3.
The cotton pad wipes. Drag it across the skin and the grime comes off — what is underneath is the clean face, not a drawing of one.
The bar at the bottom is the mark out of a hundred, and the notch on it is what this round asks for. Half of it is the wiping, a third the spots, the rest the cream.
More stars means more grime, more spots, a higher mark and less time.

What makes this one different

Three tools, and each one does one thing. The cotton pad wipes: drag it over the skin and the grime comes off. The tweezers pluck, one tap on one spot, and a tap on bare skin costs you. The cream only spreads where the skin is already clean, so it is the last thing you do and not the first.

What comes off is exactly what the artist painted. There are two faces, the same face twice: a clean one and a blemished one, drawn at the same size. The game shows the clean one always, and lays the blemished one on top through a mask; rubbing rubs out the mask. No blemish is drawn by the code. And the mask is also a grid of numbers, so the mark at the bottom is a measurement of how much grime is left — not a bar that fills with time.

▶ Play Glow