First Light: Lucina

The lighthouse Lucina stands on a black basalt shore, and tonight her lamp is dead.

You are the Keeper's apprentice, alone in the lamp room an hour before dawn with a case of betafite — uranium crystals that glow green-gold and burn an image straight into a photographic plate, the way Becquerel's salts did. Lucina's signal rides on glass. At first light the rising sun fires through the great lens and whatever is on the plate goes out over forty miles of black water.

You have five nights and five plates. Get them right and Lucina is relit.

The night

Each plate shows its target as a ghost on the glass: cells that must go dark, cells that must stay clear.

• Lay betafite where you want darkness. A crystal exposes every cell it can reach, hardest at its own cell and weaker with distance.
• Lay friskets — cut brass masks — over the cells that must survive. A cell under a frisket takes nothing at all.
• Watch the two rails. Dawn climbs the left edge, and the sky through the north window goes indigo, blush, bone, first light. Dose climbs the right edge, because every crystal out of the lead case is dosing you. Fill it and the night ends.
• Fix early if you dare. Fixing stops the clock and banks the dose — but the plate is scored exactly as it stands.

A plate passes at 97% of its cells right. Perfect is possible on every one of the five.

The five plates

1. The Long Dash — one stroke down the glass. Set the masks first; the crystal finds the rest.
2. L for Lucina — her letter in Morse, read down the plate.
3. The Reef Mark — a ring, dark the whole way round, and the eye of it clear.
4. Two Ships — two hulls and the channel between them. The channel stays clear water.
5. The Rose of Lucina — the rosette of the great lens. Four masks, and no dose to spare.

Controls

Plays on a keyboard and mouse, on a touchscreen, and on a controller. Every control is bound to an action, so all three work at once.

	Keyboard & mouse	Touch	Controller
Move the cursor	WASD / arrows, or point at a cell	tap a cell, or drag	left stick / d-pad
Lay the piece	Space or click	tap again, or Place	south
Lift a piece	X or right-click	Lift	east
Turn the piece	R or the wheel	Turn	west
Pick a shape	Q / E, 1–5, or click a tray slot	tap a tray slot	shoulders
Fix the plate now	F	Fix	north
Pause	Esc	the pause pip	start

Menus take arrows and Enter, a tap, or the d-pad and the south button, with a visible focus ring either way.

How to play on the title card is the Keeper's own printed instruction, with a diagram of what a crystal reaches and what a frisket stops. It is worth the thirty seconds.

What to look at

The lamp room is lit by two things and nothing else: the sick green-gold of the betafite on the table, and the dawn coming up through the north window. Watch the room change colour as the night runs out — the sky moves through the whole ramp while you work, and the moment first light crests the sill it sweeps down the plate and fixes the glass in front of you.

The Keeper talks to you over the speaking tube from the watch room below. She is dry, unhurried, past sixty, and she is not going to come up and help. Every line she says is spoken aloud and printed on screen.

Sound is on. Play it with the volume up.