Stringline

Every clue is a line you draw.

Crossbow bolts are stuck in the walls of Castle Harrowgate and nobody saw the bow. You are the magistrate's stringer. Press on a bolt and drag its red string back along the shaft; where you think it glanced off a pillar or a piece of iron, pull the string past it and swing it round. When every string ends in the same place, that is where the archer stood. Call the hearing and the court checks your strings against the rules.

• 15 cases, 40 bolts, 3 rooms. The Great Hall, the Chapel of Saint Orm and the Gatehouse, each case laid out once and solvable only one way.
• Four rules, learned one at a time. Stone throws a bolt back only when it comes in low. Iron sends it off one angle flatter. A bolt goes straight through a banner. How much shaft shows tells you how far it flew.
• The straight answer is usually wrong. Pull every string through every surface and they meet in several places. Only the physics narrows it to one.
• Three candles a case. A string that breaks a rule burns one. Solve it without burning any for a clean seal.

Play the free demo in your browser

The first 3 cases are free to play right here, in the Great Hall. The full game (Windows, one portable .exe) has all 15 cases, the Chapel and the Gatehouse, the iron and cloth rules, and the ending.

Controls

Mouse: drag from a bolt to pull its string, pull past a surface to bend it, swing to aim, pull back down the string to undo a bend. Keyboard: 1 to 3 or TAB pick a bolt, W/S pull, A/D swing a bend, R takes a string down, ENTER calls the hearing, H shows the rules, ESC pauses, M toggles sound. Touch dragging works too. The game saves your seals as you go.

Made by CSAF

The halls are built from our own 16x16 tilesets: Verdant 07 · Interiors, Verdant 13 · Castle and Verdant 15 · Palace. The lettering is our own, and the music and sound are synthesised from note data with no samples. If you like games you have to work out, Witness Mark reads what people said where Stringline reads where the bolts went, and Linguist of the Deep is a language you learn by watching.

AI disclosure: the code, art and text of this game were made with generative AI assistance. The music and sound are procedural synthesis, not generative audio.