Blackbox vs Shoebox

So you think you understand this thing you’re holding? Think again. Stop tapping. Stop swiping. In fact, stop touching the screen at all. To crack Blackbox’s puzzles you’ll need to find solitude and stillness, climb mountains, call on friends, get in tune with the cosmos, and think outside the box. Minimalistic visual clues make for incredibly satisfying “Aha!” moments, while sonic interfaces provide an extra level of guidance and nuance that makes Blackbox accessible with or without vision. Thoughtful haptic feedback, Easter eggs on Easter eggs, and solutions that can’t be found beneath the glass of your screen redefine what a puzzle can be. You’ll never see your device the same way again. Think you’re clever? Prove it. (Blackbox is a living game under active development by Ryan McLeod. When not eating burritos or drinking coffee, he’s busy designing and developing new Blackbox challenges.) ■

Shoebox is a quiet daily game played with the photos already on your phone. Each day, the lab develops a roll of five of your own photographs: ones you'd half-forgotten. For each one, you guess two things: where you were, and when it was taken. Mark the spot on a faded map in china-marker red. Set the date on a film-camera databack. Then the lab grades your roll, from Perfect Print to Fogged. It's a game about memory: how well you actually remember the places you've been and the years that have passed. Some photos come back sharp. Others have gone hazy. That's the fun of it. — Five photos a day. A small ritual, finishable in a few minutes. — Played entirely with your own library. No stock photos, no strangers. — A shoebox that fills up: every roll is kept like a strip of film, with your streak and a quiet reflection on how your memory held up. — Hand-drawn, paper-and-darkroom design. No clutter, no noise. Your photos never leave your device. Shoebox reads your library only on your phone to build each day's roll — nothing is uploaded, nothing is collected, there are no accounts and no ads. What you remember stays yours. A new roll every day. Come back tomorrow.