Lightenette

About the game

Lightenette is a small puppet theatre. A lantern hangs over the stage on the top screen, and the bottom screen is your control board: sliders, pegs and buttons that move what happens above. Each of its five acts is one kind of puzzle.

• Act 1: swing the arms and legs of a paper marionette with four sliders until it covers its shadow on the wall. The match percentage goes up as you get closer.
• Act 2: three paper dolls must face the way the cards ask; pick one and turn it round.
• Act 3: the stage goes almost black. Move the lantern over it to find three hidden marks; the bottom screen is a map of where you have looked.
• Act 4: four strings are tangled; swap pegs two at a time until no string crosses another.
• Act 5: the finale combines the lantern and the dolls, lighting each one and turning it to the right side.

The game was made in 2026 by devgyurak, with the help of an AI coding agent, and its pictures, sounds and music are all generated by its own code. It also has a second purpose: it draws some effects that emulators have rendered differently from real hardware and measures them, so it can serve as a test for emulator authors. Those checks are in a separate test menu and never block the puzzles.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the Nintendo DS: a new game by independent developers, not a commercial release. It runs here in the DeSmuME emulator and needs no Nintendo BIOS or firmware. Both screens appear on the page, one above the other (side by side in a wide window); the bottom one is the touch screen, which you click and drag with the mouse or with a finger.

Click Play, then press Enter on the title to start from the first act; each act you clear leads to the next. The slider handles are dark on a dark board, so look for the short bar on each dotted line. Small differences between the emulator and a real DS may show on screen, but every clue is repeated on the bottom screen. F2 saves the emulator state and F4 loads it.

Controls

On a phone or tablet the DS buttons appear on screen, under the two screens (or on the sides, with the device lying down), and the bottom screen works as the touch screen.

Tips

Move one limb at a time. In the first act, watch the match percentage after each slider. When it drops, go back the other way.

Sweep the dark in rows. In the third act, move the lantern across the stage in lines, like mowing a lawn, and check the map below for the parts you have missed.

Untangle from the outside. In the fourth act, fix the strings at the edges first; the ones in the middle usually sort themselves out.

Credits and licence

Lightenette is by devgyurak ("Corvane contributors", the same team as Corvane and Hushwell) and is under the Apache License 2.0; its graphics, models, sounds and music are all generated by its own code. We build the ROM ourselves from the author's source with the BlocksDS toolkit; the licence text, the notices of the libraries inside the ROM and the exact source are linked from this page.