After eight months of quiet building, I Remember is live on the App Store. It is the eighth Tappa app, the first one we have ever shipped that is purely a game, and the smallest one we have ever published in install size.
This post is a short field note on what it is, why we built it, and why we think a noir puzzle game belongs in a portfolio that otherwise looks like a row of utilities.
What it is
I Remember is a one-stroke puzzle game wrapped around a noir visual novel. Each level shows you a geometric figure — nodes and edges drawn in hairline white against pure black. Your job is to connect them all in a single, unbroken path without retracing any line. One stroke. No backtracking. No second chances on the same edge.
It sounds simple. By the second pack of glyphs it is not. The shapes layer up — triangles, then knotted lattices, then dense webs that ask you to plan three moves ahead before you commit to the first. There is no timer. There is no urgency. The puzzle waits for you.
Between levels, a memory surfaces. Short, precise chapters — diary entries pulled from the dark — that slowly assemble a portrait of one man's life. His name is Eli Ward. He encoded everything he wanted to keep into geometric glyphs before the world began to forget him. The shapes you trace are the fragments. You are reading him back into existence, one stroke at a time.
Three design rules
- No fake urgency. No timer. No countdown. No punishment for thinking. The puzzle is the only thing that asks anything of you.
- Pure black and white. No colour anywhere in the app. Just geometry, hairline white, and the negative space between.
- Respect the silence. No music by default. Soft haptics on completion. The sound we kept is sparse on purpose.
Why a game with a story
We build utilities. Receipt scanners, dream journals, currency converters. Useful but quiet. We wanted to ship something whose job is to be sat with — a game you play in the half-light before sleep, where the puzzle and the story meter each other.
We also wanted to test a small thesis: that there is room in the puzzle category for something that is not a slot machine. No streak-shaming push notifications. No bright candy. No purchase prompts between every level. The early reviews suggest there is.
What we learned
A few notes from the build that may be useful to other indies:
- A story between puzzles changed the retention curve. A pure puzzle game has a short half-life. A puzzle that earns you a paragraph of someone's life keeps people coming back for the next chapter, not the next level.
- One verb is enough. Drawing a line is the entire interaction model. Every screen we built that asked for more than that, we cut.
- Hint, undo, reset. Three small affordances that rescued the difficulty curve. Without them, the game punishes the impatient. With them, it teaches.
What is next
The handcrafted story arc runs across the launch chapters. After that, the puzzles continue endlessly, generated by a small model we trained on hand-drawn glyphs. New chapters of Eli's diary roll out every two weeks. If you want to follow along, the I Remember page is the canonical home, and we will be cross-posting milestones here in The Forge.
Thanks for reading. If you play it and have notes, the address is on the contact page. We read every email.