Embertide — Strike the light back into the dark.

Game · Playable · v5.0 · 2026

A free, hand-drawn billiards puzzle you play with one finger. Pull back, let go, and knock the loose light into the lanterns — each orb sunk sends current up a cable to the lamp above the table, and the dark recedes as the lamp comes up. 300 levels, a daily board everyone shares, and two collectible notebooks. No ads, no pay-to-win, nothing to install.

Play Embertide

What you actually do

You get a cue ball and a handful of shots. Pull back, aim, let go — and drive the loose orbs of light into the lanterns cut into the table rails. Every orb sunk feeds its lantern, which sends a pulse up a cable to the lamp hanging above the board. Fill the light and the level is done.

It plays like billiards because it is billiards: momentum transfers on contact, orbs knock each other on, and a well-judged pot sets off a cascade. Sink your own cue ball and it is a scratch, exactly as it should be.

Two notebooks worth collecting

Playing earns stickers, and stickers live in notebooks you open and flip through. One holds proverbs from fifteen cultures with what each actually means. The other is science — twelve sections from Animals and Oceans to Forces & Motion and Light & Colour, 108 cards, every one fact-checked.

The science notebook is aimed squarely at younger players. Common cards give a child the mechanism behind something they half-know; the rare and gold ones are the facts they repeat at dinner that evening. Forces & Motion quietly explains the game they are already playing.

Drawn, not generated

There is not a single image file in Embertide. Every line is drawn at runtime — seeded wobble so nothing is mathematically round, outlines struck twice the way a pencil goes over a line it already made, hatched shading instead of gradients, and linework that boils at the cadence of a hand-drawn pencil test.

That is also why it is tiny, works offline, and installs to a home screen in one tap. The whole game is one file.

Built by IONIAN, start to finish

Embertide is not a client project or a licensed engine. The physics, the level design, the art direction and the writing are all ours, which is exactly why it sits in Labs.

It ships with the things games usually add in a patch six months later: a photosensitivity warning before the first shot with the reduced-motion switch right there in the dialog, because a game that makes people ill is not finished.

At a glance

• Real billiards physics: the cue strikes, momentum transfers, orbs collide and drop
• 300 hand-authored levels across 18 chapters, plus Endless and a shared Daily board
• Two collectible sticker notebooks: proverbs from 15 cultures, and 108 fact-checked science cards for younger players
• Drawn two ways — warm ink on paper, or chalk on a dark board
• Installs to your home screen and plays full screen offline
• Photosensitivity warning and reduced-motion built in from day one, not patched in later

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