Daily Brains · rooms inside rooms. Kick the walls from inside to move the room you are standing in.
Recursion is the nested-rooms puzzle in Daily Brains (/daily), currently a prototype. Every box on the floor is a whole room, drawn as a live miniature of what is inside it; walk in through its pink door and the camera zooms in until that room fills the board. Push every crate onto a pad, then reach the star. The twist is that rooms are soft: push against a room's edge from inside and the whole room moves one step in the room around it. Four handcrafted puzzles a day run from Easy to Genius, and a solver that searches every room at once proves each par is optimal.
STORY & LORE
Where it comes from
Recursion grew out of the recursive box-pusher idea (rooms that are also boxes), but with its own rules and look. Rooms can only be entered through their one door, the cross-level rule is the kick (pushing on a room from inside moves it in its parent, and a stuck room passes the kick up), and echoes replace true self-containment: an echo is a window onto a room, so a room can show itself forever without existing twice.
The four puzzles
Doorstep (Easy, par 14): carry a crate in through a door, seat it on the pad inside, then shove the room aside to reach the star. The Plug (Normal, par 16): you start inside the room that plugs a gap in a wall, and the only way past is to kick it out of the gap. Nesting Doll (Hard, par 19): three rooms deep; kicks pass up a level, and a room kicked into its parent's door leaves through it. Skylight (Genius, par 27, one optimal route): four rooms deep with the star walled in, and somewhere inside is an echo of the whole world.
HOW IT PLAYS
Rules
Walk with the arrows (or swipe, tap toward a square, or use the keyboard). Walking into a crate, box or echo pushes it, and pushes chain. Walking into a box from the side its pink door faces takes you inside onto the door cell; crates and even other boxes can be carried in and out the same way, and if the doorway is jammed the box is pushed instead. Leaving through a door puts you on the square beyond the box, which may itself be a door, so one step can take you out of several rooms. Pushing on a room's edge anywhere except the door kicks the room one square in its parent; you stay where you are. If that room is stuck against its own parent's edge, the kick carries on up. Dashed echoes have the same door as the room they show and lead into it.
Infinite rooms, finite rules
A room that contains an echo of itself is drawn as a tunnel that fades out below pixel size. The rules stay finite: nothing can be in one push chain twice, a box can never be carried into itself or a room inside itself, and the root room's edge is solid. Every move therefore ends after a few steps, and the whole world (every room at once) is one finite state that a breadth-first search can explore.
Camera
The board shows the room you are in, with the room around it dimmed in the margin, so a kick shows the world sliding past you. Out and In (keys O and I) zoom the camera one room at a time, and each puzzle opens with a zoom from the whole world down to you.
Scoring, hints and Practice
Each puzzle is worth up to 250: 150 for solving plus up to 100 for moves against par, minus 40 per hint (never below 60). Four puzzles make 1,000. Undo and reset are free and unlimited. A hint runs the solver from wherever you are and lights the next arrow. The day finishes when all four are solved, or earlier with Done for today in the statistics. Practice builds endless unscored puzzles (Easy, Normal, Hard) with the generator, which only keeps puzzles that cannot be solved without the doors (Easy) or without kicks (Normal, Hard).
TODAY'S SET
| Tier | Puzzle | Rooms deep | Par | Optimal routes | Needs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Easy | Doorstep | 2 | 14 | 10 | doors (impossible without) |
| Normal | The Plug | 2 | 16 | 12 | kicks (impossible without) |
| Hard | Nesting Doll | 3 | 19 | 9 | kicks passing up a level |
| Genius | Skylight | 4 | 27 | 1 | kicks; the echo (35 moves without it) |
REWARDS
| Event | Reward |
|---|---|
| Finish the day | 15 Tickets |
| All four at par, no hints | +25 Tickets |
| Room Service (first day finished) | Bronze · 10 Tickets |
| Square Peg (any puzzle at par, no hint) | Bronze · 10 Tickets |
| Four Rooms Deep (solve the Genius puzzle) | Gold · 25 Tickets |
| Self-Similar (perfect day) | Gold · 30 Tickets |
| Nested Habit (3-day streak) | Bronze · 15 Tickets |
| Base Case (7-day streak) | Gold · 40 Tickets |
| Stack Overflow (30-day streak) | Legendary · 100 Tickets |
VERSION HISTORY
- Prototype launch in Daily Brains: nested rooms with door-only entry, kicks that move rooms from inside and pass up levels, and echoes (windows onto rooms, including the whole world).
- Four handcrafted puzzles (Doorstep, The Plug, Nesting Doll, Skylight) with solver-proven optimal pars 14 / 16 / 19 / 27; the test also proves each puzzle needs its signature rule.
- Live miniature rendering of every room, smooth zoom in and out of doors, Out/In camera, unlimited undo, reset, solver hints, Practice mode with a generator, streaks and a spoiler-free share line.