You are trapped in a room with the Book of Shadows. Solve its five shadow puzzles before midnight, or the shadow comes to trap your soul in the book. Solve them all and you are free.

Play the real version in your browser (best in landscape, with sound on):
https://book-of-shadows-5alywo.rive.to

About this file
This is a marketplace edition of my entry for the Rive × Contra Halloween Challenge. The original uses a custom font, so for this release the fonts had to be replaced and could change the appereance for some pages. Everything else is the same as the live version.

How to play
Open the Book artboard and play its default state machine (Story). Strike the match, drag the cover open, and move the candle with the pointer. Each paper figure's shadow moves with the light, and near the right angle it turns into the monster it hides. Hold the light there to break the vow. Hold the flame at the edge of your sight to look around the room. Don't touch the door.

What's inside
• Rive CLI: the whole project was written as RML, Luau and WGSL by AI coding agents from my direction and playtests, then fixed by hand in the Rive Editor.
• GPU Canvas: shadows that morph into their monsters, a ray-marched fog, candle flames, and light through the paper.
• Luau scripting: the game, the paper folds and page turns, the look-around, and the midnight ending.
• Data binding and state machines: the Story state machine plays the acts from the view model's act enum.
• Every illustration is a classic 2D Rive vector drawing and animation.

Note: it's a heavy file (about 80 scripts, 23 shaders, around 59,000 objects), so it takes a moment to open and runs best on a recent computer.