You start with one point of light in the dark, and it grows. Touch an empty patch and you plant a light there, and the growth bends toward it, so the shape of the world is an argument between what it wanted to do and where you kept putting your warmth. Grow it long enough and some of the deep points begin to ripen, and a ripe point is a door. Go through it and you land on one point of light in the dark, and it grows.
Why it exists
The inside wing is about the strange machinery of minds, and this one is aimed at the oldest lever in it: the cost of hurrying. Almost every game teaches you that going faster is going better. This one charges you for it, quietly, and never gives the money back. The interesting part is not that haste is punished. It is that the bill arrives three worlds later, when you have forgotten which decision it was for.
The ring is the only gauge
A door tells you how ripe it is by the arc of the ring around it and by its colour cooling toward white. There is no number, no bar and no label anywhere on the screen. Learning to read the ring IS the skill, and it is why two people can play this for the same hour and come away with very different folds.
One currency, spent three ways
Lights are all you have. Plant one to steer the growth. Spend one to take a ripe door. Or spend one to force a door that is not ready, which works, every time, and is the whole game. Descending competes with growing the world you are in, so every light you spend there is a light you cannot use to leave it.
Haste is inherited, and it never decays
When you take a door, the game reads how hurried you were from three things already on the screen: how mature the world was, how ripe the door was, and how much you actually grew the place. That figure is carried down and added to, and nothing below you ever pays it off. Let it climb past a certain point and a world simply stops offering doors, and the only way on is back up. Early haste is cheap. Late haste is nearly free, because nothing below inherits it. The middle of a fold is where it bites.
Where the shapes come from
Nothing here is drawn or authored. Each world picks its growth algorithm from its own seed, out of three that are real: space colonization, the botany-research method behind leaf venation and river deltas, where growth reaches toward unclaimed ground and consumes it; phototropic boughs branching alternately under Leonardo da Vinci's observation that a limb's substance is conserved through every fork; and a slower mycelial drift. The branch probability, the step decay and the depth limits are drawn once per world too, so worlds differ in temperament rather than in settings.
A name is a world
Every world has a name, and the name is not a label, it is the world. Hand the same name to the game on any machine, any day, and every angle, every branch and every colour comes back identical. The name lives in your browser tab. Send someone a name and they can stand exactly where you stood.
The quiet never chases you
A fold holds twenty minutes of world time, and it only counts while you are actually there. The clock stops when the tab goes away and slows right down while you hold the world's breath, so a phone call, a doorbell or a long look at something costs you nothing. When the quiet comes in it seals the fold wherever you happen to be standing, and the point you started from wears one ring for every stratum you reached.
The name
To infold is to fold inward. The artwork this grew from opens one point out into a whole world. This one runs the other way: you fold inward and downward, world inside world, and what you spend on the way follows you.
Where it came from
The engine came from an earlier artwork with no score, no economy and no way to lose. This is what happened when that world was asked to want something from you. The growing, the doors and the way everything eases home at the end are inherited whole; the lights, the ripening, the debt and the quiet are the game built on top.
The quiet parts
Your worlds are saved in your own browser and nowhere else. No account, no ads, no tracking, and every sound you hear is made by the page as it goes, so nothing is downloaded and nothing is streamed.