Evening Star is a five-minute escape room where you have to relight the lighthouse before the Evening Star, (wrecked a hundred years ago), hits the rocks again and the ghosts drag you into the dark sea with them.

Best with headphones! 🎧 🎃🎃🎃🎃

The whole game was built from the terminal using the Rive CLI with Claude Code: the scene in RML and the game logic in Luau.

GPU Canvas: two shaders do all the atmosphere, one for the sky and the sea (sunset to storm, rain, lightning, the lighthouse beam) behind the tower, and a pass over it with procedural flames and smoke for the lamp, the candle and the stove, the water rising through the room, the vignette that closes in and the red flash of the scares.

One Luau script runs the timeline, 18 interactive objects, the inventory, the close-ups and the puzzles.

As for the Data Binding, a view model connects the script to the markup: subtitles, messages near the click, the timer, the hover label, the mission card and the native cursor.

Human touch: Claude Code wrote the code, while I chose the art direction (the lighthouse modelled and rendered in Cinema 4D in two states, 1926 and 2026, and a period typeface instead of the usual blood fonts) and made the creative decisions: making the story hold together, aligning the style of the objects and opening with a few cozy seconds.

Then I playtested it through more than a dozen rounds (I even lost the first few times because the game wasn't finished yet!), and each round reshaped the game. Many of the moments players remember came out of those notes: the stuck cabinet that takes three shoves and scares the cat, the portrait that falls after three clicks, the key that drops out of the melting candle and bounces onto the table, the music box whose crank breaks off in your hand and becomes the lighthouse handle, the bell you ring to answer her lantern.