字源GLYPH RUN
Survive the night and you'll travel back in time. You ARE a character — spirits swarm from the dark and your ink strikes back on its own. Fallen glyphs are experience: level up to EVOLVE into related characters, all the way to your oracle-bone form. Every survived wave opens a gate deeper into the past — 隸書 to 甲骨文 — and the night gets harder.
← back to the arcade b57
⟳
Turn your phone sideways — the night is wide
人 STAGE 1/4 · Regular Script
skill LV1
glyphs 0
hp ♥♥♥♥♥♥
日
rì
sun

字源 · GLYPH RUN

You ARE the character. Steer — ink, arms and your family's gift fight on their own. Gather fallen glyphs, evolve back to the bones.
卜
① pick your character
② pick your weapon — already cast in bronze

卷 · THE STAGE SCROLL

Each page is a character. Ink it to open the next.

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GATE PASSED

Your glyph evolves…
文房 · THE SCHOLAR'S DESK
One refinement is brushed onto the scroll. Choose what the desk sharpens: 筆 brush · 墨 ink · 硯 stone · 紙 paper.
篆刻 · THE SEAL CARVER
Radicals cut into the stone stay carved between runs. Every survived wave and every 15 glyphs earn a cut.
0

PAUSED

The night holds its breath.

卷 · THE SCROLL

LOST TO TIME

亡 wáng — the broken blade: “to perish”
The character faded before reaching the bones.

TRACED TO THE ROOT

You grew the glyph across 3,000 years of script.
← more games
Just steer — WASD / arrows, or the joystick on touch. Your ink, your weapons and your family's gift all act on their own.
A tiny lesson in disguise: the script eras (隸書 → 篆書 → 金文 → 甲骨文) are real, and so are the character families — 大 is a person with arms spread, 舞 a dancer with plumes, 牢 an ox in its pen, 犇 a stampede, 美 a dancer crowned with ram horns, 羴 a whole flock, and 為 is a hand leading an elephant to work. Han Fei wrote that people who had never seen a living elephant imagined one from its bones — 想象, “to imagine”, is literally picturing the elephant. Real historic forms for every character: 字源字形 on zdic.net.
Music: 古筝 guzheng field recording by kevp888 (freesound.org/s/725336), CC BY 4.0; selection tones by nanliu_music (freesound.org/s/847157), CC0.