Voltown

The town has gone dark. Its wiring is in your hands now. Touch a cell and the wire inside it turns. Run the line from the supply to the windows, and the house comes alive: current travels along the wires, the windows light one after another, and the dark street has one more lit house on it. Nothing counts down and nothing can be lost. No time runs out, nothing burns out, a turn too many costs you nothing. Put the phone down halfway through a house and it will be waiting exactly as you left it. And the town keeps getting more interesting. A second supply turns up in a house. A crossing where two wires pass straight through each other and never meet. Coloured light, and a lamp that will take only its own. Walls the wire goes into and comes back out of on the far side. Every new rule waits for you in a house of its own — quiet, nearly empty, with nothing on it to confuse it with. You work it out once, and after that it simply works. A whole town, from those first windows to blocks too big to fit on the screen. And one house every day. A new one at midnight, cut to your own size: it is built from how far you have got through the town, and it grows as you do. The days add up into a run — it holds for as long as you keep coming back, and it ends the day you skip. Up to three stars a house: one for the light, one for a tidy solve, one for a quick one. The last of them waits for you instead of hurrying you: a house you already know meets you with your own record, and you can beat it in your own time, on the second visit or the third. Five minutes in a queue or half an hour before bed — it sits just as well in either. One hand, on the move, with the sound off. Turn the phone on its side and the street takes the full width; a board too big for the screen comes closer with a pinch. No ads. No purchases. No sign-up required: the game plays with no network at all, and everything you have done stays on your device. Cloud save and anonymous statistics are both there, and both stay quiet until you switch them on. Stay away for a few days and the game says so. Two themes: dark the way the town is, and a light one so the board reads in sunlight; several languages, sound and vibration — all of it lives in the settings. Bring the town its light back.