Lantern Hollow

Lantern Hollow started as a two-week prototype about a light source you could put down. Everything in the finished game grew out of that one verb: you carry the lantern, so you choose what is visible, and the puzzle is usually about what you agreed to stop seeing.

The art is painted in layers and composited at runtime, which let a two-person art team ship forty-one distinct rooms without a texture budget blowout. Rooms stream in under 3 MB each, so the whole game installs at 118 MB on a mid-range Android device.

We ran a nine-week closed test with 340 players from the Play Console testing track before launch. Room 22 was rebuilt four times off that feedback — the completion rate went from 31% to 84%.