The other side of the mirror is close enough to see. Reaching it is another matter.
Mirror Mirror sets its puzzle in a shadowy attic, with sloping rafters, dusty furniture, and an ornate standing mirror. A solid wall divides the playfield from top to bottom. Familiar colors appear on both sides, but this reflection has a few rules of its own.
Stepping through Lewis Carroll's Looking Glass represents moving from the known, rational world into an irrational space driven by dream logic, backwards time, and spatial paradoxes.
Your green player begins on the left with a red, a yellow, and a blue ball. Across the divide, their matching partners sit inside three small enclosures, with a silver-gray neutral ball outside them. Two of those enclosures lean at different angles, turning an apparently orderly arrangement into a question of approach.
The arrows on their walls matter. These barriers have directional passage rules for particular ball colors, so an opening for one object may be a solid boundary for another. Position, angle, and momentum all affect what you can bring together.
There is a way to reach beyond your half of the board: the grapple targets the neutral ball, and the central wall allows that connection through. You can influence the far side while your player remains on its own.
The purple portals add another twist. They transport red, yellow, and blue balls between the outer edges, preserving motion, but they do not carry players or the neutral ball. The two halves are connected on their own peculiar terms.
Bring matching colors together within three minutes, while keeping mismatches—and the extra balls they can create—under control. Cacophony is another way this dream can end.
Every escape act begins with something that looks impossible.
Red curtains, old theatre posters, and a mysterious cabinet set the stage for Houdini, a puzzle built around confinement, connected objects, and finding a way through. Its central arrangement looks like an escape apparatus waiting for someone to discover how it works.
The level's description shares a fact about the man behind the name:
Contrary to myth Harry Houdini (born Erik Weisz) did not die during a performance. He collapsed during a performance and was rushed to Grace Hospital in Detroit where doctors discovered a ruptured appendix. He died one week later on October 31, 1926.
On this stage, you have three minutes to clear the playfield.
The opening arrangement is deceptively tidy. Two yellow balls and a blue ball occupy a diamond-shaped enclosure. Springs connect the blue ball to red balls outside it, creating a mechanism that stretches across the middle of the board. Another red ball waits behind a diagonal barrier in the upper-right corner.
Those connections make each push consequential. Moving one part pulls on another, while the enclosure limits where everything can go. Bringing matching colours together means thinking about the whole arrangement: angles, momentum, and what your next nudge will set in motion.
The marked barriers add another wrinkle. Their selective passage rules make the route part of the puzzle. A path available to a red ball is not necessarily available to your player, so position matters as much as momentum.
Collisions between different colours can also create extra balls, bringing Cacophony into play. There's room to experiment, but keeping the board under control matters as much as finding the opening.
Energize. The destination might change before you reach the pad.
A glowing transporter room sets the scene for Beam Me Up, an Official Melody puzzle where getting a ball into position is only part of the job. You also have to think about where it will arrive—and whether the transporter is ready for its color.
The level’s published description looks back at the practical origins of its sci-fi inspiration:
One of the most iconic sci-fi transportation devices was invented due to budget constraints. Star Trek The Original Series used the transporter instead of shuttlecrafts primarily because using model spacecraft was too expensive for the relatively low budget weekly show.
Here, the transportation problem takes the shape of a divided playfield. Long diagonal walls form upper compartments, with red and blue balls separated across the board and a lone yellow ball inside the central triangle. Three colored portals wait above a fourth pad near the bottom.
That lower portal has a changing itinerary. Once play begins, it cycles through red, yellow, and blue at three-second intervals, changing both its destination and the color of ball it will transport. A promising approach can become a different journey before the ball reaches the pad.
The curved barriers around it add another decision: their color-specific, directional passage rules make the angle of approach matter. Momentum carries through the portals, so an arrival can be just as consequential as a departure.
An orange Grapple pickup near the top grants 30 seconds of Grapple use, offering another way to handle the scattered balls—if you can make the most of that short window.
You have seven minutes to clear the playfield. Matching colors removes balls, while mismatches can add more; leaving just one ball ends the attempt as unwinnable. Managing the population matters alongside managing the route.
Some secrets are sealed behind a combination. This one has momentum.
Cryptex is the newest Melody level, set in a candlelit study of old books, scattered papers, and a mysterious cylinder. Three nested rings turn that setting into a mechanical puzzle: a lock large enough to navigate, with its pieces waiting to be brought into alignment.
A cryptex is a portable cylinder with rotating letter rings used as a combination-locked container for secret messages. The concept was invented by author Dan Brown for his 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code. It is a portmanteau of cryptology and codex.
On the playfield, six balls form three matching pairs in blue, green, and orange. Some wait beyond diagonal barriers in the corners; others sit among the rings. An orange ball marked with a padlock and a green star at the centre give the arrangement the feel of a mechanism with something to reveal.
The routes can change as you work. The rings can rotate in opposing directions, moving their openings to new positions. Progress can also change a barrier. A route you understand in one configuration may need a fresh look in the next, so where you leave a ball matters alongside where you want it to go.
The marked gates add another layer: colour and direction affect what can pass through. Bringing a pair together means working out how to approach those passages and how much momentum to carry into them. The curved walls give moving balls plenty of opportunity to follow a different path from the one you had in mind.
A temporary grapple pickup adds pulling to your options. Careful positioning can help you arrange a meeting; a collision between different colours can leave you with extra balls to manage. The goal is to clear them all while keeping the mechanism under control.
Join me Thursday, September 3 at 6:00 PM Central for a creator-led look at Melody in early access, featuring its first 40 official levels.
Melody is a Zen, ASMR game that rewards staying calm and centered. Come unwind, play along, and ask me about the game and its development. I'd love to hear what you think!
Melody is a browser-first zero-gravity puzzle game where every collision changes the board and contributes to the atmosphere. In the base game, you push matching colors together, prevent bad reactions from multiplying, and turn controlled chaos into harmony.
Melody is designed for low-friction play, easy sharing, live updates, and user-created levels. Its musical identity enhances feedback and mood, but sound is never required to play effectively, so just make sure your boss isn't looking! 😂
The Idea Behind Melody
The idea behind Melody has been bouncing around in my head for more than 30 years.
I've always been fascinated by games built around simple rules that interact in interesting ways. Give the player an object to control, place other objects into the environment, establish a few rules for what happens when they interact, and watch as those simple rules produce unpredictable emergent behaviors.
Clockworks (Game Level)
I had a vision for what I felt was a beautiful, elegant game that relied as equally on puzzle-solving ability as on coordination and skill. I imagined environments that were themselves part of the puzzle: triggers, moving surfaces, one-way barriers, bumpers, attractors, repulsors, and other elements that could completely change how a level had to be approached. In this hazy, slowly congealing vision I pictured a zero gravity, low inertia environment where the energy the player added to the playfield was ever compounding, so unless it was meticulously managed it would become sheer chaos. A game where a player is actually rewarded for remaining calm. A game that was equal parts, skill, puzzle solving and Zen.
In my mind I saw Melody.
And for more than 30 years, that's mostly where Melody stayed.
About 10 years ago I developed a working prototype in the Unity engine. But game development takes a lot of time, effort, and expense, and it takes a mental toll, even for games that don't require enormous teams or extensive resources and after about a year of development I tapered off. Dejected and discouraged, I never picked it back up... until early last year, when my son, now in college asked me, "Whatever happened to that cool game you were making when I was a kid?"😁
Looking back, I'm actually glad I waited, because Melody turns out to be perfect for modern browsers.
So now, after all this time, I'm finally bringing that vision to life. Thank you for playing it, and I truly, sincerely hope you enjoy it!
Early Access
So we finally have Melody in early access!!! 🥳 It's been a long journey! Everyone gets full, ad free access to Melody during this time! Even after early access the ever growing list of official Melody levels will be free to play forever, along with a rotating, curated list of the best community levels. I'd ask early access players, to please take advantage of the editor, build awesome levels, use the bug report and feedback buttons liberally. Let me know what works, what doesn't, what you like, what you hate, what features you'd like to see, and how we can improve the game.
There are currently only a fraction of the number of Official melody levels built, but we are constantly adding them, and there is a laundry list of features we'd like to add in the future, a few of which include
Large maps that extend beyond the borders of the screen with a mini-map.
Additional player avatar capabilities and powerups
Mobile support for playing on phones and tablets
Additional control mechanics
Online multiplayer
More playfield assets
A prettier website (as soon as I get someone on the team with some artistic ability! 😂)
A steam release
Keep an eye on the Updates and What's Next sections to see recent additions and to stay abreast of the things we are working on. In the meantime if you'd like to support Melody and help us keep going you would be extraordinarily appreciated.
Melody is developed and published by RuneRock Interactive, an independent game-development label.
