What is Relic of the Sun — Twelve chambers you can learn by heart
Relic of the Sun is a real-time top-down expedition through twelve chambers drawn by hand, one at a time, and identical for every explorer, forever. Almost every chamber fits on screen at once, so the question is never where the walls are but how to read a room you see whole. Where must the stone end up? Which order of pickups leaves the exit open? Learn a chamber once and it stays learned.
It is a twelve-level campaign, not a loop that resets: you begin at First Steps and finish, if you finish, at the Sun Colossus. The chambers between have names — Hall of Blades, Gates of Dawn, Weight of Stone, Molten Crossing, Scales of Judgment — and each is a designed problem, not a corridor. Between chambers a relic trader sells a Granite Amulet, a Temple Blade or Dune Sandals.
How to play
- Move with WASD, the arrows or the left half of a touch screen; attack with Space, J or the right-hand button. You outrun everything here.
- Gather every Sunstone ✦ — three in most chambers, four in two, one in the last — and the sealed gate marked X unseals.
- Walk into a heavy stone to shove it one tile. A stone parked on a pressure plate holds every blue gate open; so does standing there yourself.
- Levers swing the amber gates, keys open wooden doors, teleport pads work in pairs, and spikes, darts, lava and guardians chew through your 100 vitality.
Strategies that work
- Chamber IV, Weight of Stone: the corridor with the single stone is the only link between the start and the rest of the temple — the stone is the door. The walls only let you push it right, and four pushes seat it on the plate that opens the blue gate.
- Chamber VII, Molten Crossing, is the one room that truly makes you stand in lava: a single tile guarding the lever. Lava costs 20 of your 100 vitality every half second, but the timer ticks only while you are in it — sprint over, throw the lever, sprint back, and the trip costs one burn, not two.
- A lever flips its gate every 0.6 seconds you stay on the tile, so cross and keep walking. Plates are kinder: any one plate holds every blue gate, so Chamber IX has two and needs one — the stone two tiles above the left plate takes two downward pushes.
- The Sun Colossus holds 620 vitality and winds up 0.65 seconds before charging. Your swing reaches about two tiles, its body only hurts inside one: circle and strike from the outer edge of your reach. At half health it calls two scarabs; save the bottom-row heart for then.
- The clear bonus is 300 plus 240 less two per second, so it stops shrinking at two minutes and hurrying past that buys nothing. Dying costs 200. Sunstones pay 150, coins 25, the Colossus 1000, and trader prices climb 55% per repeat: a second Granite Amulet is 217.
A little history
Relic of the Sun was written for puzzle-me.com, and its ancestry is the hand-drawn dungeon: a floor plan laid out tile by tile and tested until fair. Its stones and plates come from the older tradition of box-pushing puzzles, where the game asks one question — where must this crate end up, and in what order. A generated level promises only that a path exists. A drawn level promises more: the shortcut is deliberate, and Tuesday's room is Friday's room.
Frequently asked questions
Is the daily challenge really the same for everyone?
Yes. The chambers are drawn and never change: walls, Sunstones, gates, stones, plates, levers, pads, spikes, dart heads, lava, the start and the exit all stay put. The date picks only the day's line-up — four of the first eleven chambers, always ending at the Colossus — which guardian holds each post, and where coins and hearts fell. Across 4800 daily builds the drawn tiles came out byte for byte identical.
Can pushing a stone the wrong way ruin a run?
No. All twelve chambers were checked exhaustively: twelve of twelve are solvable, and no reachable position exists from which the run can no longer be won. Chamber IV is the clean example — its walls only let you push the stone the way that helps. Elsewhere, a stone shoved somewhere useless costs you a shortcut, never the road.
Do I need to install anything, and does it work on a phone?
No install, no account, no plugin: one page in the browser. On a phone the left thumb is a stick and the right button swings. A wide screen shows the whole floor plan at once, the point of chambers meant to be learned; a narrow one zooms in and follows you, never below the size at which the room stays readable.
