Clockwork Postcards: Gear Puzzle Mystery

Behind Grandma's hall clock, which stopped in 1899, you find a tin of twenty postcards from great-great-uncle Tobias, the clockmaker. Each one has a tiny brass mechanism set into it. Work the mechanism, line everything up, and the picture comes alive: the canal shimmers, the light sweeps across, and the card turns over to show his letter.

Five kinds of mechanism

• Rings: turn the brass rings until the picture is whole. Some rings are geared together.
• Stamps: slide the pieces back into place around the gap.
• Gears: turn the panels upright, while linked panels turn the other way.
• Route: turn the map pieces to join Tobias's route from pin to wax seal.
• Cipher wheel: turn the wheel until the hidden name reads true.

A real journey

Every postcard is a real photochrom print from around 1890 to 1905: Venice, Naples, Capri, Algiers, Lucerne, the Matterhorn, Dunkirk, Haarlem, Marken, Bergen and the Norwegian fjords.

A story in twenty letters

Tobias's best design, a clock that keeps its own calendar, was stolen. He followed it across Europe: an honest shopkeeper in Venice, a runaway apprentice, a monk with a borrowed pocket watch, and an instrument maker in Bergen who had already solved half the problem. The last card explains why he never came home, and holds the piece that makes the old hall clock tick again.

Play your way

• Twenty postcards in five sets, with stars for finishing at par.
• Today's postcard: a new, harder card every day.
• The Workshop: mend gear cards before the shop closes.
• Fill the workshop with antique clocks and choose your mechanism metal.
• No timers in the story. English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. Plays offline, no account.

Controls (PC)

• Mouse: click a ring, a stamp beside the gap, a gear panel or a map piece to turn or slide it.
• Cipher wheels: click the left half to turn back, the right half to turn on.
• Enter: starts a card, files Tobias's note in the album, closes a story card, goes to the next card, resumes.
• Esc: back / pause; on the title it asks before quitting.

The itch.io version

• No ads. No in-app purchases. The full game, once.
• Hint (shows the next move), Auto (makes it) and Peek (shows the finished picture) are free buttons on their cooldowns (60 s, 90 s, 45 s). Continue in the Workshop (60 s more) is free once per run.
• "Double it" from the mobile version is not in this one.
• A 540x960 window that fits a 1080p screen and can be resized.

A gentle puzzle story: no violence, no scares.

Credits

Postcards: photochrom prints, c. 1890-1905, Library of Congress (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons. Clocks and instruments: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0). Walnut and paper textures: Poly Haven and ambientCG.com (CC0). Music: "Meditation Impromptu 02" and "Deliberate Thought" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC BY 4.0. Fonts: IM Fell English SC, Spectral, Fredoka (SIL OFL 1.1). Made with Godot (MIT). Crash reports by Sentry (MIT). The places are real; Tobias, his family and his letters are fictional.