CUTBANK

You never see what happened. You see what it left behind.

A cut bank is a face of ground sliced open: beds of rock stacked in order, a dike of cooled melt forced up through them, a fault where the ground broke and slipped, and a wavy surface where time itself is missing. Every one of those is a thing that happened, and the ground records the order they happened in. Your job is to read it.

Each cut deals you eleven events on cards. Stack them oldest at the foot. The cartridge does not score you and it does not tell you which card is wrong. It names the two events you put the wrong way round, and the rule that proves it: superposition, cross cutting, inclusion, and five more. Then you read the ground again.

It does not ask for the one true history, because there usually is not one. Erosion destroys the record, and what survives often allows several orders. The cartridge checks every relation the ground can actually prove, and accepts any stack that breaks none of them.

48 hand picked cuts

Selected from 714 generated candidates, none of them unsound, laid out on a measured difficulty ladder: the opening cuts accept 23,760 different orders and the last accept two, out of the 39,916,800 an eleven card stack allows. The median cut has ten readable relations, and every cut needs the traces, not just the layer order, for at least one of them.

They add up to something. Every cut you read true is sealed in the field book, and reading the last one closes the cartridge: the book comes up with all forty eight seals stamped, and it tells you how many you got at the first reading. That is the only score here, and it is the one a second pass can chase.

It is a real Game Boy cartridge

32,768 bytes, no memory bank controller, the whole game inside the address space a DMG has. The art is 207 of the cartridge's 256 tile slots and the sound is the Game Boy's own four channels driven by register writes, so there is no audio file anywhere in the package because there is nowhere to put one.

It is a plain no-MBC ROM intended for a flash cart or any accurate DMG emulator. Being straight with you: every test run was in binjgb, and nobody here has put it in a real Game Boy or opened it in BGB, SameBoy, mGBA or Gambatte. There is no reason to expect trouble, but "should" is the honest word.

Play six cuts free in your browser

The demo is a separate cartridge with only six cuts compiled into it, not the full game with a flag set, so none of the other forty two are hiding behind a URL.

What you get

• cutbank.gb, the full 48 cut cartridge, 32,768 bytes, with the readme and the licence
• a field book that marks the cuts you have read and remembers, for each one, the fewest readings it took you

There is no save battery in a 32 KB no-MBC cartridge, so the field book is a chapter list rather than a save file: it lasts as long as the console is on. Any cut can be opened at any time, so nothing is ever locked behind progress you have lost.

How it differs from our other Game Boy cartridge

COMPOSITOR reaches a known target in the fewest moves. CUTBANK recovers an unknown past from traces. One is optimisation, the other is inference.

Controls

D pad moves. A lifts and drops a card. START submits a reading. B opens the field book. SELECT mutes.

Made with

Hand written C on GBDK-2020. No engine template, no stock art, no sampled audio.

AI disclosure

This game was built by AI. The code is AI written, the pixel art and the cover illustration are AI generated, and the text is AI written. The sound is not tagged as AI because there is no audio file to tag: every sound is the Game Boy's own hardware synthesiser driven by register writes, with no sample, no soundfont and no music service involved. The same disclosure is printed inside the cartridge, on the instructions screen, because a buyer who writes the ROM to a flash cart never sees this page again.

More from CSAF

More games from the same studio:

• WITNESS MARK
• PROOFMARK
• SCRUPLE
• ROSE ENGINE

Everything else we make is at csaf.itch.io.