Curio is a puzzle box game for Android. You hold a closed box, turn it, find the lock that gives way and work out how to open it. Then there is another box, and another after that, because a box in Curio is built from its number and there is no last one. Curio is out on Google Play, free to play, and has a page of its own on this site with screenshots and a short film.
Why a box and not a level
Handmade puzzle box games are some of the best things you can play on a phone, and they end in an evening. The people who loved them went looking for the next one. Curio is our answer to that gap: a generator that draws a new box for every number, so there is always one more to open. Every box is tested to be solvable. A solver opens boxes 1 to 10,000 and 3,000 numbers spread over a million, and the tests fail if one of them cannot be opened. Box 1 is the same on every phone, so the first box teaches the idea the same way to everybody.
What a box is like
A box is a cube with a face on every side. Swipe it or tap the arrows to turn it. Each face holds something different: a panel, a drawer, a row of dials, a maze. The box never says which side holds the next lock, so turning it and looking is the game. The locks lead to one another. One frees the next, and the clue that opens the last one is hidden in an earlier one. Every box holds a curio, from a fossil that looks like a cog to a key with no lock, and a note from the boxmaker who made them all. The first twenty-four notes tell one story.
Twelve kinds of lock
Shake the phone until something loose inside jams the box. Turn the box over. Tilt the phone until a spirit level sits level. Roll a steel ball through a tilt maze to the hole and keep it out of the pits. Rub the dust off a brass plate to read the engraving. Set engraved dials to a code you found. Put brass levers up or down as the studs on a card show. Slide marquetry tiles back in order. Turn brass pipes until the water runs through. Bend a beam of light with mirrors from the lamp to the gem. Press studs that flip their neighbours until every stud is dark. Watch bells light up in a run, then ring them in the same order.
Every box mixes a different set of them, so two boxes in a row never open the same way. The first box teaches the idea, and later boxes get longer and add more. Every twenty boxes the box is made of something new: walnut and brass, brushed steel, oak and iron, bronze, ebony, chrome, copper.
The phone is part of the box
Some locks open only when you shake the phone, turn it upside down or tilt it. Every one of them also works by touch, with a drag to tilt and a swipe to shake, and you can switch motion off in Settings, so nobody is locked out by a phone that cannot be tilted. Sound and vibration each have their own switch, and nothing in a box is told only by sound or only by vibration.
Hints, stars and ads
Each lock has three hints, one small step at a time: what it is, how to do it and, last, where to look. Hints are free and never sit behind an ad. Every box earns one to three stars, three for opening it with no hints and no wasted moves, and the stars become points that add up to the total score of your shelf. There is no timer.
Curio is free to play, with one banner ad on the shelf and after a box opens, never while you are solving one. There are no full-screen ads and no ads in exchange for hints. One purchase removes the banner for good.
How the film and the pictures were made
The screenshots and the short film on the Curio page are captures of the game itself, played with real touches in a phone-sized browser window, not pictures from a phone. The film is rendered frame by frame from the running game: nothing in it is drawn or faked except the captions, the finger and the wipes between scenes. The Android app is the same game.
Where to find it
Curio is on Google Play, and its page on this site, vibesoftstudio.com/products/curio, has the Google Play button. It is made by VibeSoft Studio, a small independent studio in the Netherlands. The game has no server and no account: it saves on your phone and works offline. Questions or ideas: info@vibesoftstudio.com.