NOCTUARY

Sixty-six nonogram plates. Solve one and it develops.

The grid of squares you have just filled in resolves into a mounted specimen — in colour, at full resolution, with a Latin name, a catalogue number and a line from the collector’s journal. Then you file it in the drawer and open the next one.

New in 1.2.0. EXAMINE now also finds a square you crossed that the specimen fills, and when The Reading runs out it points you to EXAMINE. Row clues with a two-digit number are spaced by the width of the numbers, so 1 10 1 no longer reads as 110 1. The free demo below now holds only its own two drawers; the full cabinet's plates come with the download. The same sixty-six plates, so a cabinet you have started carries on where it was.

New in 1.1.0. Text, rules and specimens are drawn at your screen's own resolution, so the game stays sharp on high-DPI displays and at Windows 125% and 150% scaling, and a window larger than 1280×800 is filled at 16:10. Empty rows and columns now print a 0 clue. Press C on the cabinet for the credits, which carry the AI disclosure. Three species names that printed a tripled letter are spelled correctly. Marks made just before you close the page are no longer lost. The paid download's licence is now NOCTUARY's own, and both music tracks loop without a near-silent gap. The same sixty-six plates; the full list is in the Readme.

Every plate is solvable by logic alone

This is worth saying plainly, because it is not true of every generated picross.

A puzzle drawn from a picture is not automatically fair. Some pictures are genuinely ambiguous — more than one arrangement fits the same clues — and others have a single answer that no chain of reasoning can reach, so the only way through is to guess and backtrack.

Measured on this corpus: at 20×20, only about 64% of specimens produce a fair puzzle. The other third are thrown away before you ever see them. Every plate in the cabinet was solved by a line-by-line logical solver, with no guessing, before it was allowed into a drawer.

You will never need to guess. If you are stuck and every mark so far is right, there is always a next step — and the Reading will show you one, worked out from your own board rather than read off the answer.

No timer, no penalty, no fail state

Marking a square wrongly costs you nothing. Nothing is scored. It is a cabinet you fill at your own pace on a wet evening, and the music is written to be ignorable for twenty minutes because nothing here is hurrying you.

Every moth is drawn by the game's own code

Every moth is generated from a genotype — six organs drawn from an AI-authored vocabulary of 56 marks (10 forewings, 8 hindwings, 18 wing patterns, 7 antennae, 6 bodies, 7 wing margins), plus eight colourways. The puzzle grid is that genotype rasterised to 10, 15 or 20 squares; the specimen you see when it develops is the same geometry resampled at full resolution. That is why the moth never shifts as it resolves — only its detail changes.

The names are generated from the animal too. The genus follows the forewing and antenna, the species epithet follows the wing pattern, the common name follows the colourway. Falcaria ocellata really does have falcate wings and an eyespot. Work through a drawer and you will start to read the labels before you solve the plate.

Six drawers

Drawer	Grid	Plates
First Drawer	10×10	12
Second Drawer	15×15	12
Third Drawer	15×15	10
Fourth Drawer	20×20	12
Fifth Drawer	20×20	10
The Night Case	20×20	10

Difficulty is measured, not guessed: each plate is graded on how many passes a solver needs to close it and on the narrowest moment in the solve — the point where the fewest squares anywhere on the board are deducible. The Night Case holds only plates that grade exacting.

Sound

Two pieces of music, written for this game and rendered from note data by oscillator. No sample, no soundfont, no music service. Press M to mute; it is remembered.

Try it in your browser first

The demo above is playable right here, free, no download. The paid Windows build is the full cabinet.

Controls

Left click or drag to fill · right click or drag to cross out · click a mark again to erase · H for a Reading · Esc back to the cabinet · M to mute. Drags lock to the row or column you started in.

Made by Core Systems Asset Factory

One HTML file, a stylesheet, eight small JavaScript files and two audio tracks. No engine, no framework, no analytics, no network access. You can read every line of it.

More games from this studio: ONE ROOM DREAD · The Brass Orrery · BANNERET · Wicklight · Antipole

We also build tools for developers: Sigil Core (RPG Maker MZ — every spell generates its own animated seal) · Meridian (GameMaker — constellation skill trees) · the full catalogue