Inkblot: The Art Restorer

The night the ink woke up

Three in the morning in the restorer's workshop of the Nocturne Gallery. An inkwell nobody has opened for a hundred years starts to tremble, and a living blot of ink crawls out. It goes through every hall spitting at the canvases: the figures drown in ink, and their shadows slide off the paintings and land in a tangled heap on your workbench.

Seven hours until the museum opens. Every shadow has to be recognised and returned to its frame.

Paint a shadow whole, and it goes home

The silhouettes on the bench lie on top of one another and cut each other into dozens of pieces. Pick a paint and colour every piece of one figure, including the parts other figures cover. Once a figure is whole in a single colour used nowhere else, it lifts off the bench and flies back into the painting, and the borders it drew through its neighbours disappear.

The whole puzzle is in reading the outlines: whose arm is this, whose hat, whose skirt?

A museum of real masterpieces

• 128 famous paintings, from van Eyck and Caravaggio to Repin, Degas and Van Gogh
  
• 111 levels in 17 halls, from a quiet entrance hall to the Grand Hall
  
• Diptychs and triptychs: the shadows of two or three paintings heaped together
  
• A short story for every painting; reading it earns a free hint

The blot plays dirty

Every hall has a trick of its own: mirrored and upside-down shadows, a meagre palette, ink stains on the bench, a lamp that lights only a spot under your hand, a turntable, a tilting carousel and a spinning top with the shadows wrapped around it.

Made for a quiet evening

• No penalties and no rush: the clock only counts, it never hurries you
  
• A hand-painted workshop, thick oil paint and gilded frames
  
• Hints show what the figure you are painting still lacks
  
• Available in English, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and Japanese