Levels 1-5 are free. Levels 6-30 need a $3 licence key. About the full pack
Driftquartz is a small logic puzzle that runs in your browser. It suits a Halloween evening because of how it looks, not because of a costume: the piece you slide is the amber of a carved pumpkin, and the board is dark as a night sky. The gems are ice blue.
To be plain about it: there is no Halloween mode. There are no ghosts, no spooky sounds and no seasonal levels. The game is the same 30 levels all year.
Level 1 of Driftquartz at the start: the amber piece, a blue gem, grey walls and the shut exit (the crossed ring).
The sliding rule
Pick a direction and the piece slides that way until a wall or the edge of the board stops it. You cannot stop halfway. Every gem it passes over is collected. The exit stays shut, and the piece slides right over it, until you hold every gem; then it opens and catches the piece.
A calm game for a Halloween night
There is no timer, there are no lives and nothing chases you. The game counts your moves and nothing else, so you can leave a level half solved, answer the door and come back to it. Undo takes back one move at a time and Restart resets the board. The five free levels use boards of 5x5 and 6x6 with 1 to 3 gems, and their shortest solutions run from 3 to 7 moves.
Level 1, move by move
Level 1 is a 5 by 5 board with three walls and one gem. Counting rows from the top and columns from the left, the piece starts in row 5, column 1; the gem is in row 2, column 5; the exit is in row 4, column 5.
- Slide right: the piece moves four cells and stops at the edge of the board.
- Slide up: the piece moves three cells, picks up the gem and stops against a wall. On the way it slides straight over the exit, which was still shut. The exit is now open.
- Slide down: the piece moves two cells and is caught by the open exit.
That is three moves, the par for level 1: the computer search found no shorter solution.
What is free and what costs $3
Levels 1-5 are free: no account, no key, no time limit. Levels 6-30 are the full pack and need a $3 licence key, sold on Gumroad. You enter the key on the unlock page and the 25 extra levels are stored in this browser.
Read more: Free logic puzzle, No-download gem puzzle, How to play