What's new
Everything that changed, newest first. The site tells you when a new version ships — refreshing is always your call.
PYLON: night football with a front office
- PYLON is arcade football under floodlights: drag back to throw, juke the tackler whose shadow streaks first, and run a club through fifteen games and the Lantern final.
- When the other club has the ball you call BLITZ, ZONE or MAN, then tap as a ring closes on your best defender; a perfect tap is an interception you run back.
- Between games there is a presser, level-ups, a front office with a three-round draft, and sixteen clubs that remember who knocked them out.
StuCasino: eight rooms and 36 Club trophies
- StuCasino opens with eight casino rooms sharing 10,000 play credits, from Blackjack and Roulette to Craps, Keno and the Grand Wheel.
- Earn Club levels, daily commissions, card backs and table felts, with all 36 trophies also appearing in your hub trophy case.
- Your wallet, unfinished hands and Club progress follow your account between devices; play credits have no cash value.
Komorebi: a clearer HUD and 24 garden trophies
- Komorebi gives scores and chains their own space, matches the Show all control to the other modes, and tidies its footer with a quiet StuStudios credit.
- Fourteen new trophies recognize botanical collections, Journey medals, Daily stars, field plans and greenhouse varieties, grouped in the hub trophy case.
- Saved score improvements now reach the hub during play, missed records retry on reload, and completed runs open the hub’s end-of-run cards.
StuStudios 2.2
- StuStudios 2.2 gives the games below a reason to come back: in most of them a daily that is the same for everyone that day, and in all of them new bests and trophies to chase.
- Around the games, the site now suggests what to play next and keeps what you earn: an account level that only goes up, and trophies named as they land, kept for the account a guest goes on to make.
- StoryPilot 1.3.0 keeps track of the stories it has read, and four games have left the arcade.
Every game
- The Annex: Pointers, Maze Paint, Gridlock, Territory, Splice and Mains each set one Medium board of the day, the same for everyone, and the shelf ticks off each one you clear.
- Bellfall’s Ford has Today’s draw, the same ten heroes and sides for everyone each day, and every hero’s card carries three bells to ring.
- In Black Start, TONIGHT is one building and one night for everyone each day, and once the black start holds, every building with a warden offers a DURATION TEST on its worst round.
- Chunklord’s Daily Orders deal everyone the same rule change, starting weapon and first draft each day, and a weapon you evolve joins your Armoury to start runs with.
- Clubroom sets a day’s puzzle for everyone, gentlest on Monday and hardest on Sunday, turns the mistakes a review finds into the Lamp’s notes, and lets you play a member at odds, up to giving the queen.
- Council of Idiots deals Today’s docket, the same reign for every ruler each day, and decrees open the four too-little endings a normal reign almost never reaches.
- Dead Stroke’s Nightly is one spread of nine balls a day for every player, ball in hand, until a shot pots nothing.
- After your first Lantern, DRIFTWORKS lets you write a New Charter under Charter Terms, from Squall Season to Short Pay, for Charter Stars, and every Seal now shows in your trophy case.
- Final Form’s DAILY is the same run for everyone each day, and clearing all seven heroes opens Renown: five harder levels.
- Once you have met a settler’s request, FOOTHOLD puts a request for the day in your bag, the same build for every player, and coming back tells you what grew while you were away.
- Each day The Heavy Eight listens for one word, the same for everyone, with a riddle for a clue, and the Ledger’s new Sayings page is a book of the 35 things the orb can say.
- Hoops’ Daily is one stage for everyone each day, scored by the seconds left when the target falls.
- Every Last Seen case keeps a casebook across attempts, and a Closed case can be Proved: every other suspect placed away from the scene, every story covering the killer fallen.
- Loose Change enters every banked level in a ledger with three stamps, Top jump among them for a landing that pays ×4 or better, and from level 4 a daily course starts everyone on $1.00.
- After your first operation, Operation Room offers today’s case: one procedure a day for every player, its bleeders opening in the same places and order.
- Once gate VI holds, Ouroboros offers Today’s Gate, one of the 24 gates with two relics, the same for everyone; fell all four wardens and the Gauntlet runs them back to back on two candles.
- After your first five minutes, each Pencils Down desk opens in one of its other layouts, turned by the day, and the new Notebook writes a pencil line for each of the 36 things the desk can do.
- Perigee offers today’s tide after your first run, one world for every player on Spring, and a new Almanac marks every way you have won on each difficulty.
- The Perils of You now keeps a Matinee ledger on the Cutting Room’s Record page, and the Lessons page reruns any house chapter you have seen.
- Riftline’s daily operation is now the same board for every player each day, and every feat on the Feats board, plus three daily trophies, shows in your trophy case.
- In Show, Don’t Tell the meadow of the day is the same for everyone, Past days keeps four weeks of them, and Pip’s notebook lists all 90 ideas Pip can hold.
- After training, SPOOL DECK’s exchange posts one night job a day, the same on every deck: two stars on weekdays, three at weekends.
- Sprawl’s Daily Island changes at midnight Taipei time for everyone, every lit Atlas island has BRIGHT and ALL OUT marks to earn, and lighting New Moon opens NO MOON: five islands in the dark.
- Clear №10 in The Steady Hand and LEVELS holds the daily wire, one new board a day for every player, with its own three bulbs.
- Trickshot’s Daily Court is three fresh courts a day, the same for everyone, with nine balls to sink all three; beat a boss again on its second lap for a ball or trail the shop doesn’t sell.
- Tumblebox’s manual keeps a test log of 64 entries, every change on the element cards and everything the bodies can do, and each day the Box menu holds a work order, the same rig for everyone.
- Type vigil on Word Horde’s title for tonight’s leaf, one night a day on one of the three texts, and every wyvern you cut down to its name adds its kenning to your word-hoard, until all sixteen are in.
- Once you’ve finished a story, Word Salad offers Today’s story: one of the 88, the same for everyone that day, with its title hidden until the end.
Across the site
- Inside a game, the StuStudios menu now has Next up: two games to play next, each with a line saying why it was picked.
- When a run ends, a small card may suggest the next game, with its reason, on phones too. Press Not now on it twice in one game and it stops suggesting there for 30 days.
- Come back to the arcade within ten minutes of leaving a game and Now showing picks games that follow it, under “After” and that game’s name. Signed in, leave a game within a minute and it suggests something different.
- Every game’s page in the Guide now ends with three more like it, each with the reason it was picked.
- Your account now has a level, from the tokens you earn by playing. Spending tokens in the shop never lowers it, and it never goes down; it shows on your account page, in Your ledger on the home page and beside your name on the leaderboard.
- Your account page lists up to three trophy sets you are closest to finishing, with the trophies each one still needs, a hidden one by its hint. The trophy case counts the sets you have completed and the games you have tried, and a game’s guide page says how many of its trophies are yours.
- Signed in, the home page has a Continue line under the news: up to three games you have played for two minutes or more in the past two weeks, each one link away.
- Cards inside a game now wait for a break in play. Only a trophy card shows at once, at most one every ten minutes, and it names the trophy, or says “a hidden one” for a secret.
- As a guest, the game’s menu shows what this browser is keeping for you, such as “On this browser: 2 trophies · 1 best score”. Make an account and your saves, trophies and best scores come with you, whichever page you sign in on.
- Signed in, the game’s menu shows your level and how many of that game’s trophies you have, each a link to the full list, and a level or badge from the last three days gets one short note the next time you open a game.
- Every game and every tool page now has its own name and StuStudios in the browser tab, and every game is credited as a StuStudios game.
- Today: one game is the same for everyone each day. If you’ve played here before, it’s the first card in Now showing, with one button into that game’s daily and tomorrow’s game named underneath.
- Signed in, the Today card sets three small goals a day: 3 minutes of today’s game, 2 minutes of another and 2 minutes of one new to you. One game can tick two, and the goals don’t give out tokens.
- Inside a game, the menu shows how many of today’s three you have done, and a goal met gets one short note when the game pauses, once per goal per day.
- Your account has a new Your days section: your week run and a calendar of the days you played. A week counts when you play on any day of it, a run carries on through one week off, and your Profile tab can hide both everywhere.
- Your ledger and the leaderboard show your week run instead of a day streak, and play-token events are announced ahead with their dates, such as “your first hour of play each day counts twice”.
- New for January 2027, the January Challenge badge: tick all three of the day’s goals on 8 different days in January.
StoryPilot
- StoryPilot 1.3.0 remembers every story part whose quiz you submit, with StoryPilot or with the site’s own Submit button, so AutoLoad Links never queues it again and Auto Mode never reads it twice. The list stays on this computer.
- AutoLoad Links says what it did, such as “Added 3 new parts · skipped 2 you’ve already read · 1 already in the queue”, and the same part under two addresses is queued once.
- Start on a story you have already read, or a submit the site follows by moving to another page, and the run carries on from the next unread story without spending a credit.
- The popup’s queue shows each part’s book and when it was added: ↑ makes a part the next one Auto Mode reads, × takes it out, and Forget what I’ve read, pressed twice, empties the read list so AutoLoad Links can queue those parts again.
- A quiz finished where StoryPilot isn’t running isn’t on the list; take that part out of the queue with its ×.
Leaving the arcade
- Window, Lull, Premiumnizer and The Button have been taken off the site, with their tiles and their pages in the Guide.
The Annex Pointers Maze Paint Gridlock Territory Splice Mains Bellfall Black Start Chunklord Clubroom Council of Idiots Dead Stroke DRIFTWORKS Final Form FOOTHOLD The Heavy Eight Hoops Last Seen Loose Change Operation Room Ouroboros Pencils Down Perigee The Perils of You Riftline Show, Don’t Tell SPOOL DECK Sprawl The Steady Hand Trickshot Tumblebox Word Horde Word Salad
Komorebi: clearer plants and a balanced first screen
- Komorebi’s plants have clearer shapes, richer botanical colors and cleaner details, with sharper artwork on high-density screens.
- The first garden and guided Journey sit in a centered desktop layout with compact notebook panels and no empty management column. Board physics and gradual activity discovery keep their existing rules.
Komorebi: a quieter garden book
- Skipping Komorebi’s guide now keeps activities appearing gradually; Show all remains a separate choice.
- Available garden projects and plant deliveries take priority. Later plans and automatic reward meters are collapsed, and commissions appear when they become available. Existing progress and rewards are kept.
Komorebi: reliable tools, lessons and save imports
- Expedition dew guarantees now wait for the next non-golden draw when they coincide with golden seeds, so Raincatcher and habitat effects keep working together.
- Sun Drop updates familiar-species Journey goals immediately, while first discoveries and merge counts still require real pairs.
- Replaying the guided Journey starts with the matching and pocket lessons, and failed save imports keep your current garden and offer a retry.
- Keyboard focus stays inside the Garden Book when visitor delivery controls are disabled, and expandable details remain reachable.
Komorebi: steadier sunbeam rewards
- Komorebi gives fewer sunbeams from repeatable orders, crops and routine rewards. Harmony and Firefly bonuses now add to Prism instead of multiplying together; merge scores, crop growth and first chapter rewards keep their current rules.
- The first upgrade prices stay the same, while later ranks cost more. Existing balances and purchased upgrades are kept, and saved orders still pay their promised reward.
Komorebi: a terrarium that grows a home
- Komorebi joins the arcade: match falling plants, keep a seed in your pocket, and leave room for the next bloom.
- Follow 24 Journey chapters, build your own Sanctuary cultivation choices, or take three-stop Expeditions with divided planters, nursery shelves and travelers who offer a different way through the next clearing.
- Real merges grow crops for a permanent greenhouse with four specimen positions, pollen decorations, visitor stories and twelve Garden Projects; a discovery comes from merging a pair, and Sun Drop helps with species you already know.
- Daily Seed uses a shared sequence and a fixed 40-drop kit, while Blitz gives you 90 seconds, and an optional guided opening introduces the pocket and your first greenhouse specimen.
A challenge every month: November and December
- The monthly challenge carries on after October’s. The 2026 November Challenge is for playing on 8 different days in November, with two minutes or more of play on each, across any of the arcade’s games. Like every badge, it stays on your account once you earn it.
- The 2026 December Challenge follows on 1 December: play 5 games you had never played before December, two minutes or more each. Your account page shows each challenge from two weeks before it opens, then how far you are and the day it ends. Play counts while you are signed in.
Cookie Croft: it says what it does, and the sky is on the page
- Cookie Croft says what it does: 46 places where a tooltip, a message or the manual said one thing and the game did another now agree, from the Express’s crate count and pay to the auction’s gather times, the drift’s lamp numbers, the renown and rosette sources, and what prestige keeps.
- A reload mid-cook counts as a step away now, a timer you boost is fixed when you plant, Pond Works take a Hustle charge and say when they finish, and giving something up asks first and names the cost.
- The sky is on the page: each weather tints the page and the weather chip, fading over a second and a half when it turns; plots read as earth, crops grow by size, and the big cookie shows banked Hustle as bites.
- New sounds where moments had none or borrowed the wrong one: a fanfare on a rebirth, a gavel at the auction, a crack for rock, a strum for Harvest all, a short cue for each sky and a bell for the Weather Glass. Nothing loops, and a hidden tab stays silent.
What changed, for players coming back
- Come back to the home page and a line under the search says when a game last changed and what, and takes you to it. On a game you have played, its tile says what changed, and the game itself tells you once when you open it, with a link to its list of changes.
- NEW now marks the newest launches only, six tiles at most, so it means something again and an UPDATED badge shows among them.
- Where the arcade ends, two cards say what the Tools and Extensions drawers hold, and their buttons at the top count them.
- A first visit stays simple: one game to start with, a line saying to pick any game or let the die choose, and the die never rolls a guest onto a game that needs an account.
The arcade marks what you’ve played
- A game you have played for two minutes now has a check by its number on the home page, and Not played yet, above the grid, shows only the games you haven’t tried. The die (surprise me) rolls one you haven’t played whenever there is one.
- Signed in, the checks come from your account’s play, on every device, and the first two minutes in a game you haven’t tried earn you 8 tokens, for up to 24 games. Signed out, your browser keeps the checks itself and sends them nowhere.
Trickshot: how to aim, on a phone held upright
- On a phone held upright, Trickshot’s first two levels now say how to aim (drag, then lift to shoot) as well as suggesting you turn the phone sideways for a bigger court. Before, the sideways tip took the place of the aiming help.
Clubroom: a brighter table, and the board in 2D
- Clubroom's board is easier to see: the lamp lights the whole board and the cloth round it, the black pieces have an edge against the dark, and when you play Black the lamp hangs over your side.
- Press D in Clubroom for the diagram, the same set laid flat as a chess book prints it, with engraved dark squares, a caption saying the last move and whose turn it is, and in review the glyph for each move on its square.
- In Clubroom a mated or resigned king now falls the way a real one does, gathering speed and landing with a knock and a bounce.
- Going from Clubroom’s puzzles or analysis board to Play now sets the pieces back on their squares; an unfinished puzzle is still there when you go back.
Return Stroke: plinko inside a thundercloud
- Return Stroke is a plinko roguelike. You are a thunderstorm crossing a sleeping coast, and each hour from 22:00 to dawn gives you five drops to reach its quota of Thunder. The ball falls through ten rows of ice crystals, and when it lands on a rooftop with a lightning rod the bolt climbs back up the exact path it fell, firing every peg it touched a second time. Between hours you build the cloud from twenty-two kinds of peg: Forks split the ball, Thunderhead multiplies Surge on every stroke that passes, Echo runs a stroke twice, Prism fires its whole row. Buy a peg you already own and it goes up a level. Miss a quota and the storm blows itself out.
- Hours 4 and 8 bring a front that changes one rule, from a Crosswind that pushes every ball to the right to a Blackout that darkens the middle rods. Four storms start from different pegs, each with five Forces to climb by reaching dawn, and the daily storm is the same storm and seed for everyone that day.
Digsite: a season is a month
- Digsite’s world now re-rolls once a month instead of every Sunday: a new season starts at midnight UTC on the 1st, so a hole has a whole month to get deep. Boards, plaques, notes and bought swings last the season, and your museum and lifetime tiles carry on as before.
Badges: 2026 Halloween and the October Challenge
- Your account page has badges now, earned by playing on the right days, and they stay once earned. 2026 Halloween is for playing any game for a minute on Friday 30 or Saturday 31 October. The 2026 October Challenge is for playing 10 different games, a minute or more each, during October; your games since 1 October already count, and the page shows how many you have.
The Perils of You: every chapter, lit
- Every picture in The Perils of You is now lit like a tinted film print: moonlight on the snow and the water, a lamp over the room, the fire throwing its own light, with shafts, shadows and grain, and still in one colour per reel. Each chapter’s title card now opens on its picture, and the Programme shows the opening shot of today’s Matinee.
The Perils of You: the picture after typing on a phone
- In The Perils of You on an Android phone, the picture above your marked plan and the verdict came back zoomed in on a corner after you typed; it now stays the picture you saw while you read.
Metronome: your weekly Pulse check-in, filled in
- Metronome is a new Chrome extension in the Extensions drawer. Set your answers once, and each week it taps through your Pulse check-in on Pulse’s own page, saying which answer it is about to give before it gives it. The first question, how you are feeling, stays yours unless you choose otherwise, and it never taps “I need some help”. It finds the check-in link in your Gmail, talks only to Gmail and Pulse, and downloads with a free account.
Redshift: steering that turns in
- In Redshift, holding a steering key at speed no longer pushes the nose wide. On Easy and Normal the steering now stops where the front tyres grip hardest, and stability control catches the rear when it starts to slide. Off still leaves all of it to you.
Redshift: choose your own keys
- Every Redshift control can now go on the keys you want, two keys to an action, in Settings › Controls. The choice stays on the device you set it on.
Clubroom: trophies for wins on your own, and Graphics per device
- In Clubroom, beating a member earns their trophy only when no hint, takeback, evaluation bar or analysis board helped, the same rule the club rating already kept. Trophies you already have stay.
- The Graphics setting now stays on the device you pick it on, so a phone no longer takes a desktop's High. Every device starts on Auto, which steps down by itself when the board runs slow.
Cookie Croft: no error when the sound cannot start
- On a computer whose sound output cannot start (none plugged in, or another program holding it), Cookie Croft now plays on in silence; before, every sound it tried to play counted as an error behind the scenes.
Black Start: a town in the dark, and something on a round
- Black Start is a choose-your-own-adventure told entirely in emergency signs. Carrow lost its power at 01:13, and every choice is one of the signs still lit, each printing its cost in battery minutes and in your night vision before you press it. In four buildings a fire warden walks a posted round: a sign that would get you found says FOUND first, standing still in the dark lets her walk past, and when she does find you the night ends there. When a battery dies the building goes back to 01:12 and you keep what you learned. 34 endings, and one last night at the substation once all four buildings are finished.
Sprawl: bring your light home
- Sprawl is a land grab on the night side of an island. You are an orange street lamp: steer out of your own lit streets and you string a line of light behind you, bring it back and everything it closed around lights up as yours. While the line is out it is your weak point, and six rivals, each glowing the colour of its element and each playing its own way, are looking for it. Light the six islands of the Atlas one by one, play the Daily Island, or settle a grudge with one rival.
The Steady Hand: a hundred levels, ten acts, then endless wire
- The Steady Hand is now a hundred house levels in ten acts, a timed gauntlet at the end of each act, and an endless wire past level 100. Sparks join from level 4, swing-gates from 11 and couplers from 21.
- Progress from the old ten-level version does not carry over. Your saved levels start again from level 1 on this version.
StoryPilot 1.2.0: it says when to update, and keeps a weekly goal
- StoryPilot’s popup now tells you when a newer version is out, and shows events running on StuStudios, like a day of extra AI credits. If a copy is too old to keep using, or StoryPilot is switched off for a while, it stops, says why and links to the download, and nothing is spent. A new weekly goal counts each story you finish once; that count stays in your browser. It talks to stustudios.net only, and its messages are in plain words: a solve says it used 1 Hub AI credit.
Trickshot: three balls to sink it
- Trickshot is a basketball puzzle on a gym court at night. Point from the ball to aim: the direction is the angle, the distance is the power. Three balls a level, three stars for one. Every level is built from its number and checked to be beatable before you see it, so a missing star is a court to come back to: walls to lob over, bumpers, funnels, windows to thread, spinners and sliding planks. Every fifth level is a boss, the Keeper, Blackout, Gale or the Shell Game, and the first win over each drops a ball or trail the shop does not sell.
The Perils of You: a serial with you in peril
- What Would You Do? comes back as The Perils of You, a silent film serial with you as its hero. Every chapter stops at the worst moment; you type exactly what you do, and the Narrator rules it on four checks, threat, means, time and detail, strikes through the words that would have killed you and shows you the way out. Sixty hand-written chapters in six serials are judged in your browser, the same way every time, so you can play them signed out; signed in, the hub AI writes new chapters without end. Modes: Serials, a daily Matinee everyone shares, One Life, Marathon, Nitrate against the clock, and Villain, where you write the trap.
Digsite: a trophy for the full museum, and the fixes it was missing
- A finished museum is now a trophy: own all forty finds and it goes in your case. “Down here now” counts the people actually digging, not everyone who dug this season. The record sheets (Boards, Museum, Hall, Log) work from the keyboard again. Your find-score record is the rarity-weighted score the Boards panel shows, not a count of finds, and a short visit 19s tiles count on your record too. The HUD no longer redraws itself sixty times a second when nothing on it changed.
Riftline: SPINDLE turns teal
- SPINDLE, the beam that sweeps and cannot be dodged, is teal now, on its shop chip and on the field. It was the one violet thing in a game whose palette refuses violet, and teal was the one gap on the tower wheel, so no two towers look alike. Nothing about how it plays has changed.
Clubroom: chess in the back room
- Clubroom is chess in the back room of a club at night, on a boxwood-and-ebony set whose every piece was turned on a lathe. Play ten club regulars, from Tilly, who is eight, to the Lamp, the club’s engine; the nine people among them favour their own openings and have something to say about your moves. Or play a friend on the same screen. After a game the Lamp goes through it move by move, with each side’s accuracy and the better move drawn in green, and there’s a box of 56 rated puzzles and an analysis board for any position you paste in.
Perigee: the tide takes the towns
- In Perigee, a real-time world-domination game, the only thing you move is a burning moon. Haul it across a shallow-sea world and its gravity lifts the sea beneath it and on the far side at once, and wherever your water stands over a town’s sill long enough, the town swears to you. Sink low to pull harder until the moon strains and sheds, throw a shard of it to raise a tsunami, and beat three rival moons that play by the same rules: hold more than half the world’s towns, by weight, for 40 seconds, be the last moon lit, or hold the most when the Last Tide comes at 32:00.
Cookie Croft: fair weather, hot hands and a table at Granny’s
- Cookie Croft can now read the sky: the weather chip shows what comes next, a Weather Glass gives you a minute’s warning, every sky does something for your hands, a sunny spell dries the Roadside Stand so listings sell faster for more, and the kite swaps a forecast slot instead of picking tomorrow blind.
Six new systems
- Hot Hands: the Farmhand Bonus is a streak now, with a six-minute clock between chores; a failed or expired chore breaks it, hard chores and the weather bend the odds, and a late upgrade adds another chore slot.
- The Treat Jar: each pet has a treat that buys a two-hour job: the dog fetches what your orders are short of, the cat patrols the sheds behind the Crow Trap, the duck casts your idle lines while you watch the pond, and the pony hauls a cart that widens the stand.
- The Fishmonger’s Slab: a Fish Platter from any three common catches and, at level 28, a Seafood Tower from any two rare ones. You pick which fish go in.
- Granny’s Table: a set menu from the recipes in her Little Book that the Factory, the delivery truck and Rival Granny all cook from, and a daily number of hers to beat.
- The Show Bench: every festival opens three show classes that take your rarest goods for score, and the first entry in each takes Best in Show.
Redshift: three roads, one evening
- Redshift opens on the arcade: a 3D road race over three circuits in one evening, a coast road at golden hour, a mountain pass from sunset into blue hour and a city ring at midnight in the rain. The clock runs with your race, so the light goes while you fight for position. Draft in the red wake behind every car, burn SHIFT to surge past, and race seven rivals for the evening’s championship, or the ghost of your best lap in Time Trial.
Tumblebox: falling sand, and the dummies that live in it
- Tumblebox opens on the arcade: a test chamber of falling sand where every cell carries a temperature in degrees, the air carries pressure and metal and salt water carry current. Pour, heat, spark and drop things, then read what happened off the thermometer under your cursor, while sawdust-stuffed dummies stand, swim, burn, freeze and snap among crates, barrels, ropes and rockets. Every element’s card is written from the same table the box runs on, and the Box menu holds three scenes and three save slots.
Last Seen: six murders, and the sighting everyone believes
- Last Seen takes The Case File’s place on the arcade: six murders, each against its own clock, at a seaside radio station that went silent at 01:31, an observatory snowed in at 1,140 metres, a seafront hotel on its last night, a tidal island cut off by the tide, a hospital ward on the night shift and a village pub on quiz night. Search rooms, question people, set their stories against door logs, phone logs, a Wi-Fi table, a tide board, a morphine pump and a till roll, and break the ones that don’t fit. Everybody agrees when the victim was last seen alive, and in every case they’re wrong. Then charge someone with who, the minute, the weapon and the motive.
Nine games leave the site
- Split-Flap Display, Sandboxels, Emberfall, Cube Studio, What Would You Do?, Way Out, Coup and Catan have left the arcade, and Apex Grand Prix has left Limbo. Coup’s and Catan’s online rooms have closed with them.
- Time you spent in them counts toward your tokens, and their trophies leave your trophy case with them.
UPBEAT: a 1,200-metre climb that keeps time
- UPBEAT takes Fall Arrest’s place on the arcade: one tower, 56 numbered stages and six summits from a night street through the jet stream to orbit, where beat blocks, spikes, lifts and lightning all keep time with music made as you play, and the music rises with what a fall would cost you. Climb in Checkpoints mode, with a save every fourth stage, or in Summits mode, where only the summits save you.
Lull, water with no seam
- Lull: thirteen waters we filmed ourselves, from Mirror lake to Sunlit falls, each looping full screen with no seam you can find. Touch the screen and a ripple opens; the next water arrives through it. Sound stays off until you turn it on.
New accounts confirm their email with a code
- Making an account with an email now sends a six-digit code to that address, and the account is made once you type it in. It proves the address is really yours, so it is the one we can always reach you on when you need a way back in.
- The code lasts fifteen minutes and only works in the browser that asked for it. Didn’t get it? Send a new one from the same screen, or fix a typo in the address and try again. Signing up with Google is unchanged.
Bellfall: two new heroes, the Ford and the storm
- Bellfall has ten heroes now. Clem, the Bellringer, rings from far off: his Handbell hits on a ring with a quiet middle, and Great Tenor rolls a ring out across a wide circle that deafens everyone it passes. Wat, the Waller, raises dry-stone walls nobody walks through, then shoves people into them.
- Bellfall’s new quick mode, the Ford, is one road over the river with all ten heroes drawn at random, five a side, from level 3 and 1,400 gold. A match runs about ten minutes.
- In Bellfall a summer storm now rolls up the valley at 14:00 and every eight minutes after (sooner and more often at the Ford). Lightning marks a circle round a hero and strikes it a second and a quarter later, either side: step out of it.
- Six new Bellfall trophies, from winning at the Ford inside eight minutes to coming through a storm without a strike.
Dead Stroke, pool under one lamp
- Dead Stroke: 8-ball and 9-ball on a 3D table against five AI players or a friend on the same screen. Every shot is simulated before it is shown, so the camera is already waiting at the pocket, and eighteen Run-Outs are fixed layouts to clear in par.
Final Form, a bullet hell where you are the boss
- Final Form: hold your creature’s glowing organs to pour bullet patterns at a gold hero ship, cage it, and graft what it leaves behind. Seven heroes, one run, no score.
Pencils Down, a desk to wreck
- Pencils Down: crush, rip, smash, burn and ink the worksheets and calculators of math class with seven tools, then turn the lamp down in Afterglow and let the paper float away as lanterns. Nothing is timed or scored.
Update emails, if you want them
- Your account page has a new box: "Email me when new games and big updates land". It is off unless you tick it, and nobody was signed up for you.
- If you made your account with a password and have never signed in with an emailed code or Google, ticking it sends one confirmation email first, and nothing else arrives until you use its link.
- Every update email has a one-click unsubscribe link that works without signing in, and your mail app’s own Unsubscribe button works too. No tracking images, no tracked links.
Lost fixes back in five games
- Word Salad: holding Enter no longer fills the rest of a story with random words, and the history sheet works from the keyboard: Tab to a story, Enter or Space to open it.
- Council of Idiots: a damaged best-reign record no longer reads “undefined days” or blocks every new best; your next reign replaces it. The How to play close button now has a name a screen reader can say.
- Way Out: “what you remember” on the title screen opens the ledger without starting a night, so it can no longer replace the night CONTINUE offers. A shift that eases the meter now softens a sign’s cost to nothing instead of paying you for it, a damaged saved night is no longer offered, a held number key takes one sign, and the clock stops looking like it is ticking when it is not.
- Emberfall: swapping armour with a full pack keeps the old piece, Q drops the stack you are holding, mute survives a reload, a broken save no longer leaves Continue dead, Stoneheart walls and a blood moon survive a save and load, the scroll wheel leaves the hotbar alone while the journal is open, a cancelled touch lets go of the swing button, and the beacon prompt shows the 6 wood a relight costs during the Long Night.
- The Case File: “A different night” and “New case” clicked within a second now deal different nights, and a closed case can no longer be charged a second time from the keyboard.
Honest sign-out notices, and a record that read backwards
- Coup no longer says you were signed out when you were still signed in and only your account changed mid-game: the room reconnects and keeps your seat.
- Catan no longer says you were signed out when you were still signed in and only your account changed mid-game: the harbor reconnects and keeps your seat.
- Catan’s "Watch this game" button now opens the game to watch, instead of a room code that does not exist.
- Way Out’s record for nights before an escape now shows your fewest nights, not your most.
Headings a screen reader can say
- The small spaced-out headings on the home page, the guide, the forum, Credits, the leaderboard, Limbo, StoryPilot’s page and the 404 page are real words now, so a screen reader reads them as words. They look exactly the same.
Sprinting works again, and no more wasted credits
- Emberfall: holding Shift to sprint no longer freezes the game. Stamina drains and refills again and the screen keeps drawing.
- What Would You Do?: when the AI thinks out loud instead of answering, the game now retries cleanly instead of failing with "Something went wrong" after spending a second credit.
Online rooms that know when you have gone
- Coup and Catan: if you are signed out in the middle of a room, the room tells you so and offers to sign you back in, instead of trying to reconnect forever. A wifi drop still reconnects within a second.
Digsite’s swing count, the same in every tab
- Digsite: buying swings while another tab is open no longer makes both tabs show the old count for a few seconds.
Operation Room, a surgery sim
- Operation Room: 90 procedures in seven specialties, from a swallowed key to a heart transplant. Cut through each layer on the line, cauterise what bleeds, lift out what does not belong and stitch the patient shut, while the vitals panel counts down. Every operation pays XP toward six ranks, up to Chief of Surgery.
Ouroboros, a marble shooter with a bite
- Ouroboros: bite a marble out of the serpent and fire it back where three will burst. A run is a rite of 24 gates in four temples, with relics that change the rules, elements that react in pairs, wells that curl your shots and an armoured warden at the end of every temple.
Play first, sign up later
- You can play the arcade’s games without an account now, on three days of play. A day only counts when you open a game, so coming back next week costs nothing.
- Make a free account whenever you like, from the StuStudios menu inside any game: the saves on that browser, and the trophies and best scores you earned as a guest, come with you.
- Coup, Catan and Digsite are played online with other people, so they still need an account. So do What Would You Do? and StoryPilot, which spend AI credits, and Limbo.
Search the Guide
- The Guide has a search box over its contents: type a game’s name, a kind of game, a key or any word from its manual, and the list narrows to the games that answer, each showing the line of its manual that matched.
- Press / to jump to it from anywhere on the page, Enter to open the one game left, and Esc to clear it. It narrows within the kind you picked, and a link to a search keeps its words.
More company for the headline
- Six more shapes drift around the arcade’s headline: a star, a note, a cross, a heart, a gem and a sparkle. A phone has room for two of them.
Version 2: the whole arcade, rebuilt
- StuStudios was rebuilt from the ground up, and everything on this page arrived at once on 6 October 2026.
- Your account came across as it was: the same sign-in, your cloud saves, stats, tokens, AI credits and forum posts. If you were signed in, you still are.
New on the arcade
- The Annex: one tile that opens a shelf of six logic puzzles, Pointers, Maze Paint, Gridlock, Territory, Splice and Mains, each graded from Easy to Ultra Hard. Pointers moved there from a tile of its own, and your progress came with it.
- Bellfall: a pixel-art MOBA played offline, you and four bots against five over three roads between two market towns. It wants a mouse with a right button and a keyboard.
- Fall Arrest: a night-shift parkour climb up one 251-metre tower with no kill plane, where every net you rig becomes a floor for the rest of the climb.
- FOOTHOLD: one amber block in an endless void and no ground anywhere, so everything you ever stand on is something you built, and settlers arrive by balloon once you have built them a room.
- Loose Change: steer a crowd of coins through money gates, land the jump on the ×5 strip, and spend the bank on a 24-coin album of real US coins.
- Cube Studio: a 3D cube for learning CFOP, with 14 F2L, OLL and PLL cases to step through a turn at a time and a solver that unpicks a scramble.
- Word Horde: margin drolleries come to eat a page of Old English, and you type the word on each one’s scroll to scrape it off, at three hands from 25 to 70 words a minute.
- DRIFTWORKS: a 3D sky-island tycoon. Chain timber, iron and crystal through processors on nine floating islands, fly the goods between them by airship, and light the Lantern of the Drift on the Crown.
- The Button: a title screen with one PRESS START button. Press it, and a green-screen explosion blows the title to pieces before the menu drops back together, letter by letter, for another go.
- SPOOL DECK: a story you play by typing commands into a leased amber terminal, pulling files home packet by packet off a backbone decommissioned on paper in 1994, and disconnecting before the heat meter hits 100.
- Window: a shopping sim for the itch that never charges a cent. Configure 73 fictional products, pay from a $10,000 pretend wallet and follow the delivery across a map.
New in Limbo
- Four games are in Limbo while we test them: Overprint, a one-button runner cut like a risograph gig poster; Wyrmlash, a neon survival game where your tail is the only weapon; Idle Forge, a workbench for building your own idle game; and Rubble, a physics sandbox for knocking things down.
Playing together
- Digsite digs: one underground world, 512 tiles wide, that every signed-in player digs at the same time. What you cut stays cut, the lanterns in the dark are other diggers, and a find uncommon or better leaves a plaque with your name on it for the rest of the week.
- In Digsite you get 100 swings and one comes back every 20 seconds, open tab or not, and every Sunday at midnight UTC the world is re-rolled. Play tokens buy more swings, in packs, on the Credits page or from Buy swings in the game.
- Catan’s online rooms work: open one from the Open sea panel and share its code, or join a friend’s, signed in like the rest of the arcade.
- Coup runs on the site itself now, so you sign in to play it like every other game, and every game you finish counts toward your stats. Your standings came across.
- If a phone drops off wifi in the middle of a Coup game, the AI takes the seat within about two minutes until its player is back, instead of the table waiting out the turn clock.
The arcade
- Liquid Glass was rebuilt and is the site’s look now: the controls are panes of glass floating over the page, a lens magnifies whatever it slides across, and it comes in light and dark. Pick Light, Dark or Match device under Appearance on your account page.
- Paper is called Classic now, and if you had picked a theme before, you still have it.
- The arcade sorts itself: your starred games first, then up to four that launched in the past week or changed in the past three days, then the rest in order of how the whole site played them over the last four weeks.
- Star a game on its tile or on its page in the Guide, and it stays at the top of the arcade on every device you sign in on.
- Now showing: posters at the top of the arcade picked from what you play and star, each saying why it is there. Until you have about ten minutes of play or a star, you see the same posters as everyone else.
- A game that launched in the last three weeks wears NEW, and one that changed in the last two weeks wears UPDATED; point at UPDATED for the name of the change.
- Search the arcade with / or the magnifying glass: type a name, a kind of game or a mood, and the dice rolls among what is left.
- Every game has its own page in the Guide: how to play, screenshots, its trophies, what changed, and reviews from players saying whether they recommend it. Report a bug or suggest something from the same page, or from the StuStudios menu inside the game.
- stustudios.net opens straight onto the arcade. Browse every game, the Guide, this page and the forum without an account; signing in is asked for when you open a game, and you land back on it.
- Small text that used to be too faint reads clearly in every theme now, from tile tags and pills to the gold text in Midnight and Gilded.
Tools and extensions
- A Tools drawer beside Games: Winget Kit, Tweak Kit, Settings Jump and MsgBox Studio for Windows, Brew Kit and Defaults Kit for a Mac, and Stop Code, which runs anywhere. Each tool says which system it is for, and the drawer dims the ones that won’t run on yours.
- The Extensions drawer has extensions again: StoryPilot, which reads a story on the Chinese-stories reader and answers its quiz on your AI credits, and Salvo, Blockjam and Blockfall on the Chrome Web Store.
Your account
- A trophy case opens your account page: every trophy you have earned, game by game, lit with the day you got it, beside the rest of what each game hands out. Endings and secrets show only a hint until you find them, and nobody else sees your case.
- Your cloud saves are itemised: what each game keeps, how much and when it last changed, and you can delete one game’s saves without touching the rest.
- Every game that saves now syncs. Frostfang Hunter 3D, Apex Grand Prix and Split-Flap Display moved their saves to new names and carried your progress across, and a save too big to sync stays on its device while the rest carry on.
- A Credits page shows the AI credits you can spend: what is left of today’s free ones, and your bank, which never expires. Trade play tokens for credits there, up to a daily limit, without dropping a place on the leaderboard.
- Bring your own OpenRouter key: add one on the Credits page and get 10 more free credits a day for games. They go to OpenRouter’s free models with your key, so they cost you nothing, and they still work on a day the site’s own AI budget has run out.
- Invite a friend with your own link: once they have made an account and played on three different days, you both get credits.
- Your account page lists where every AI credit went, and a reply that never comes refunds its credit. When the site’s shared AI budget for the day runs out, the games say the AI is resting until tomorrow and nobody is charged.
- Sign-in is one page that opens on its form: Enter submits, Show reveals your password, a saved passkey is offered as you click into the email box, and an emailed code can be sent again.
- Signing up with an email that already has an account offers to sign you in instead, and a new account made with Google never shows other players the name on your Google account.
- A ban page says why, when the ban ends and where the appeal stands, and a temporary ban lifts itself on time.
Games you know
- Cookie Croft: past bedrock the Mine goes sideways into seams you work rock by rock, the Workbench makes tools that wear out as they work, the Root Cellar ages goods into cider and mead, and the Auction Barn sells whales and fossils under your own gavel.
- Cookie Croft also gives Renown something to buy in the Mayor’s decrees, grows the Dare Book to ten dares and the Deed Wall to 30 prestiges, and lets you share a finished Wonder with the county for a Keepsake that stays through every prestige.
- Chunklord: kills shatter into chunks of the enemy’s own colour, a Chunk Warden takes turns between its ring, a SLAM down a red lane and a two-armed spiral, and the Hoarder, a lime box that runs from you, pays a shower of shards and a free draft if you catch it within 14 seconds.
- Chunklord also brings spawns in ahead of you when you run in a straight line; the mute button works on phones, the screen stops shaking on the draft, pause and death screens, and late runs no longer slow to a crawl.
- Burning Note’s sheet holds 12 ruled lines, words wrap whole to the next line, and the handwriting is bigger on phones; turning a phone sideways and back no longer shrinks your note.
- Emberfall’s objective panel moves left, out from under the StuStudios menu.
- In Limbo, Short Order fits phones and tablets, Frostfang Hunter 3D’s HUD makes room for itself on small screens, and Chumhaven’s corner shows only your coins, pearls, the biome, the weather and the time of day.
Gone
- Serpent Arena and Blockcraft are off the arcade, and Blockcraft is being remade.
- The casino tile is gone.
- Crews are gone, and so is their data: the site no longer keeps any record of a crew or of who was in one.
Privacy and speed
- The whole site runs as one process now, pages and games are served pre-compressed, and every game ships its own typefaces instead of fetching them from Google.
- The site records far less about you: which pages and games you open, how long you play, and errors. The click, scroll and typing tracking is gone.
- A visit made signed out keeps no IP address, device fingerprint or browser details, and those details were wiped from the visits recorded before this version.
- The Terms of Service have a new version, effective 6 October 2026, that covers all of this, down to how the arcade works out its order and what happens to an OpenRouter key you add.
Found something broken? Tell us — it lands straight on the issue board.