WARDLOCK

A locksmith's bench, a brass plate, and a lock that will not open until you understand it.

WARDLOCK is a real Game Boy cartridge — a 32,768-byte ROM you can put on a flash cart or an Analogue Pocket — containing forty-eight warded locks. Play the first sixteen free in your browser, right here on this page.

How a lock works

A lock is a set of wards. They start shut. Open all of them and it springs.

You have three or four levers. Throwing one flips a set of wards — but which set depends on the cam, a linkage with two or three phases. Every lever you throw also turns the cam, so the same lever does different work each time round. Three levers against a three-phase cam is nine different effects to hold in your head, through two buttons.

The channels engraved into the plate show you which wards share a lever. They never tell you which lever, and they never tell you which phase. That part is yours.

Every lock ships with its shortest solution

Generated puzzles are usually generated and thrown away until one looks right, which produces levels with no designed idea in them. These are built the other way round.

Every move in the mechanism is reversible, which makes the levers permutations of a state space small enough to search completely. So each lock's minimum was measured by exhaustive search before the ROM existed — then confirmed again by an independent search, and replayed until the lock actually opened. Press SELECT on any lock to see its number. Beating it is the game.

And you cannot lock yourself out. From any position you can reach by any sequence of presses, the lock is still solvable. That is not a promise about the level design — it is a property of the mechanism, proved across all 8,976 reachable states. Experiment freely. Undo is unlimited.

What is in it

• 48 locks across six tiers, from BRASS at three moves to THE VAULT at thirteen
• A sixteen-page printed manual, in a screen-reading edition and a fold-and-staple booklet edition, illustrated entirely with the cartridge's own output
• 48 different plates. Three authored frame styles, six ward shapes and nine layouts, composed by the cartridge into forty-eight escutcheons. There is no sprite sheet in the ROM — every plate is drawn from parts, at runtime, which is how they fit in 32 KB
• A proven shortest solution for every lock, on the cartridge, one button away
• Unlimited undo, because a puzzle you can wreck is a puzzle you stop experimenting with
• Game Boy sound-hardware audio: no samples, no files

The manual

Every copy comes with a sixteen-page printed instruction manual, in two PDFs:

• (single) — one A5 page per sheet, in reading order. Open it anywhere.
• (booklet) — imposed for printing. Four sheets of A4, printed double-sided flipping on the short edge, folded once and stapled twice through the fold, give you the real booklet with the cover on the outside.

It is a manual and not a readme with a border: the mechanism explained page by page, the six tiers, the full proof of why every advertised minimum is exact, the honest limits, and a two-page spread showing all forty-eight plates side by side.

Everything illustrated in it was made by the cartridge. The screens are photographs of the game actually running, driven by real button presses. The forty-eight plates come from the game's own renderer. Even the display lettering is the cartridge's own 8×8 alphabet, blown up.

Controls

• ← → choose a lever
• X throw it  ·  Z draw it back (undo)
• RIGHT SHIFT show the proven shortest solution
• ENTER continue

Said plainly

• There is no save. This is a ROM-only cartridge with no battery, so progress lasts as long as the machine is on. Locks are short; the docket is not meant to be one sitting.
• A plate takes about a second and three quarters to draw when you enter a lock. The cartridge composes all 144 tiles of the escutcheon rather than loading it, and on a 4 MHz CPU that costs what it costs.
• It has not been run on physical hardware by us. It is a standard 32 KB ROM with a valid header, verified against the two things the Game Boy boot ROM itself checks, and tested extensively on an emulator — including a pixel-exact comparison against a reference renderer and full solved playthroughs driven by real button presses. But we are not going to claim a test we did not perform.

The demo

The browser demo is the same engine with a sixteen-lock docket — tiers BRASS and IRON, which is where the cam has been taught and before the shapes widen. The other thirty-two locks are not in that file.

More Game Boy cartridges from this studio

PROOFMARK · WITNESS MARK · ANATOMIST · everything else

On an Analogue Pocket

The download is a standard Game Boy ROM with no mapper, so on an Analogue Pocket it runs through the openFPGA Game Boy core. We have not run it on Pocket hardware ourselves, and there is no .pocket build in the download.