The Neatness

About the game

The Neatness is a quiet puzzle game played with a single gesture: drawing a line. Each level shows a few skulls, a few gravestones and the walls between them. Press, drag, and a thin line follows your pointer; when it touches a skull or a gravestone, the line takes on its colour and spreads through everything it is connected to. The goal is simple to state: every skull must end up connected to a gravestone.

The catch is the word "every". Lines merge when they touch, so a careless stroke can join two skulls, or two gravestones, into the same network. When that happens the game says "Not like this" and puts the level back the way it was. The early mazes are about finding a path at all; later ones are about keeping several paths apart in a small space.

The levels come in three short chapters. The first teaches the basics. The second mirrors the screen, so every line you draw on the left is copied on the right and has to make sense on both sides. The third adds walls that grow a little every time you paint, so long detours become a real cost. A short epilogue closes the story, which is told in a handful of lines of text.

Mark Vasilkov wrote it for js13kGames 2022, where the entire game, zipped, has to fit in 13 kilobytes; the theme that year was "Death". It cites Bradley Lovell's The Looker and Jonathan Blow's The Witness as inspiration.

Playing it here

This is the build submitted to the competition, unchanged. Click Play and start drawing; there is nothing to set up. Click anywhere once if you want sound: browsers only allow the game to start its audio after you interact with it.

Progress is not saved: closing the page sends you back to the first level. The level button opens a map of the levels, where you can replay the ones you have already solved. That map also lists three bonus "Coil" levels, which were reserved for members of Coil, a web-monetisation service that has since shut down; they stay locked here.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Start from empty space. A line can begin anywhere. Drawing towards a skull or gravestone from the open floor gives you more control than starting right on top of one.

Short strokes are safer. You can lift the pointer and continue later: the new stroke joins the old line as soon as it touches it. Building a path in pieces makes it easier to avoid touching the wrong thing.

In the mirrored levels, plan for both halves. Draw on the side that is harder to fit, and check what the reflection does on the other side.

In the last chapter, be economical. Every pixel you paint lets the creeping walls grow, so the shortest line usually wins.

Credits and licence

The Neatness was written by Mark Vasilkov for js13kGames 2022. It is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3. The licence text and the source code of this build (the author's repository at the commit that produced the competition zip, plus the version of his natlib library that it bundles, under the MIT License) are linked from this page. Repository: github.com/mvasilkov/neatness2022.