About the place

Eight cabinets, a light cord, and a radio.

NOCTURNE is a small arcade that runs entirely in your browser. Six games are on the floor and two are not, and the corridor behind a bad address holds a few more. Everything about it — the lighting, the scores, the things that move when you are not looking — is plain JavaScript with no framework underneath it and no server keeping notes.

It was built as an experiment in a particular kind of website: one that behaves like a place rather than a document. Pages that remember what you did on other pages. Objects that respond to being poked. A light switch that is not a dark-mode toggle so much as a way of changing what is actually there.

What it keeps

Your high scores, whether the lights are on, and which moths you have caught. All three live in your browser under localStorage and go no further. There is no account, no analytics, and nothing to log in to. Clearing your site data resets the arcade to the state it was in before you arrived, moths and all.

If you are stuck

Eight moths are hidden across these pages, and the fourth cabinet stays dark until every one of them is found. In rough order of how obvious they are:

• One is in plain sight already, low-contrast against the furniture. It is resting on the sign.
• Several only exist when the room is dark. There is a cord in the top right corner of every page. The cellar is downstairs on the front page. This room has one too, if you look after you pull it.
• Two will not turn up until a cabinet has been played properly rather than glanced at. Finishing something is the trigger, not starting it. The snake is one of those.
• A bad address is still a room. The door in that corridor does not lead back to the floor.

There is also an old cheat code that does nothing useful. It is worth typing anyway.

The radio

There is a small tuner in the bottom-left corner of every page. Walk from one room to another and it keeps playing. Close the tab and it forgets it was on, the way a radio does when you pull the plug.

A second unlisted cabinet

VEIL, SPLICE, and WYRM are still the key to the hissing cabinet, and it still has nothing to do with the moths. A death on the overlay does not count. Each of those three has to be played until the score is real. STATIC itself is a tuner that fights back: lock drifting stations before the signal dies.

Built by Ethan Bard. Static files, no database. Source and notes are in the documentation.