WISPCATCHER
A game from Core Systems Asset Factory. Genre: Puzzle. Paid; free browser demo on the page.
WISPCATCHER is a game, paid, with a free browser demo on the store page.
A wisp hides in an old tree. Every night it hops one fork. Catch it in the fewest dawns there are. You climb a bare tree at night. Somewhere on one of its forks a wisp is hiding, and every night it moves along one limb to the next fork. Before your first dawn you climb freely; after it, every limb you climb takes a night, and every dawn you look at the fork you are standing on.
You never see the wisp until you catch it. What you see is every fork it could be on, glowing. Each look puts some of them out; each night the rest spread to their neighbours again. You catch it only when there is nowhere left for it to be, so luck never enters into it: a catch is a sweep that would have found it wherever it went.
Every tree has a proved par For each of the forty trees, the least number of dawns that guarantees a catch was worked out exactly, on a computer, before the cartridge was built. That is PAR on screen. Catch it on par for GOLD, two over for SILVER, four over for BRONZE. Going wherever leaves the fewest glows feels right, and on many trees it is still searching when the sun comes up.
At twice par the sun is up, the wisp is gone, and the cartridge marks one fork as a clue.
AI disclosure, as the store page states it: AI Assisted, Code, Graphics, Text
Paid · free browser demo on the page · Get it on itch.io. Files, screenshots and the full description are on the store page.