At the beginning of Lyxo, there is only darkness. Your smartphone becomes a dark pit, a digital manifestation of the abyss staring back at you. Then, a light appears on the horizon. And a hand, which is not there to pull you out of the darkness, but to teach you, without a word, how to use the light to make your way. That is the premise of the game.

Lyxo is a creation of the game studio Emoak – which has the experience of indies on its back Machinaero e Paper Climb, both for iOS. The new title is a minimalist puzzler, with 87 hand-drawn levels, where the player must guide the light.

In each level, the player encounters a beam of light and a visible circle on the screen – usually opposite each other. By sliding in the direction of the light, you create a reflector, which refracts the ray. You win the puzzle when you make the lighting surround the obstacles in the dark – which, ultimately, reveals the entire local scene.

The game's developer, Tobias Sturn, came up with the concept for the game while lying in bed, watching a ray of sunlight coming through the window. Seeing the light cutting through the shadows, he imagined what it would be like if he himself could guide the beam around the contours of a dark room. And so the idea for the game was born. The name, Lyxo, came soon after, as a stylization of the Latin term lux.

Bending the light

Boiling down the Lyxo experience to a “puzzle” doesn’t do its creators’ ambitions much justice. Sturn has always been more interested in understanding how games are made than playing them. “I feel like [a game] is a wonderful combination of all the other media that allows people to explore their emotions in powerful and surprising ways,” the developer says in an email interview.

Not surprisingly, the game is far beyond the traditional competitors that earn in exchange for your attention. Don't expect the game to grant you extra lives for Kwai advertisements 15 seconds. In fact, don't expect extra lives, continues, energy, or anything like that. Lyxo is far from working as a traditional puzzle.

Lyxo's interface itself is more like a visit to a Bauhaus exhibition than a proper game. After the first five levels, there are no more icons to be seen except the reset icon in the bottom right corner. There are no scoreboards, messages or anything like that.

This experience also carries over into the game’s philosophy. There’s no single way to beat a level – you can make the light go around all the obstacles before guiding it to the goal. The more reflectors there are, however, the more the light loses strength. Each refraction in a line emits a musical note, almost like a piano. And when you reach the circle, there’s no fanfare whatsoever. The room lights up, and light and obstacles form a strange harmonic geometry.

Sturn, however, admitted that this aesthetic only came into play in the later stages of the game. Initially, the developer had designed a character, in the style of “Cut The Rope”, but the idea was abandoned in favor of a more intimate experience.

Difficult show to program

Lyxo starts off impressive with its simplicity, and then with its spectacle of colors. As the levels progress, other colors need to be guided to different points. And when the player is almost guiding a rainbow through the darkness, the quality of the game's lights becomes evident.

The game uses ray tracing, which projects and alters light according to the objects in question. However, what is surprising about the game is that this feature, which requires a lot of processing power, runs smoothly even on older smartphones. Sturn says that this trick works by programming the number of rays emitted according to the user's smartphone. The newer the processor, the more rays it will emit.

lyxo will be available for download in the near future for Android and iOS.

Update: the app was released on the AppStore and Google Play.