Sneak

Puzzle · plays in your browser, no download

Where it comes from

The top-down stealth level, which arrived on phones around 2019 and has been remade a hundred times since. The shape goes back much further — to the first Metal Gear on a MSX in 1987, where the guards had a field of view drawn on the screen and the only weapon that mattered was knowing where they were not looking.

How to play

Touch anywhere and you walk there. On a keyboard, the arrows.
Take down all of them, then the door at the top opens and you walk out.
Pillars block the light as well as you. A cone that meets one stops there — the dark side of a pillar is a place to stand.
Every room is played through before it is handed out: an attentive player who waits for the cone to swing away always gets out.

What makes this one different

Every guard carries a cone of light in front of them. Step into it and the round is over at once — there is no health bar, no second chance. Reach the same guard from behind and they go down in a single move. The whole game is the gap between those two sentences: the seconds between the cone swinging away and swinging back.

No room is handed out until it has been played through. The guards go in one at a time, and each time one is added the whole plan is replayed from the start; if the new guard would ruin the approach to an earlier one, she is taken out again. And the prova does not take the builder’s word for it: it asks for the plan move by move and replays it inside the real engine. That is how it found that the plan was knocking a guard out half a frame earlier than the game does.

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