The Scholar Cat Cabinet

22 one-button arcade games. One cat. One button, asked a different question each time.

Every game is a single self-contained page — no plugins, no downloads, no network after it loads. Space or tap is the only control in all of them. Art is vector-drawn, sound is synthesised in the browser, and nothing here uses a third-party asset.

When to press

Games that ask for a moment, and punish you for being early or late.

‖ Colonnade A winged cat between marble gates at twilight. tap to flap Gravity pulls, each tap lifts. The columns narrow their gap and the sky quickens as you go. Hugging the ceiling is punished rather than safe. ◆ Catwalk An isometric ledge that turns without warning. tap to turn The cat trots along marble suspended in the night sky. Turning mid-tile doesn't snap you to the centre, so a late turn survives but costs you the coin. ⇅ Undercroft Run the vaults, floor and ceiling both. tap to flip gravity Tap and the cat falls upward to run along the ceiling. Iron teeth jut from one surface at a time, and every flip commits you for a fixed distance — the spacing is built so no pair is ever impossible to clear. ☽ Belfry Climb a bell tower wall to wall. tap to leap Leap between the stone faces, gaining height each time. Cling too long and you slide, while the dark rises from below. You have three lives. Every 25 coins rings the bell. A feather lets you leap once more in mid-air; you can hold three. ☉ Orrery Swing between brass spheres in the dark. tap to let go Release and you fly off tangentially; come within range of the next sphere and it catches you, taking its spin from your angle of approach. A dashed ray shows exactly where letting go would send you, so the difficulty is timing, never guesswork. ✦ Compline Wait by candlelight for something to land. strike — or don't Strike the instant it's a moth. Leave the beetle alone. The window shrinks from 700ms toward 240, beetles grow commoner, and the targets get smaller — three pressures at once. An average human reaction reaches about round 19. ◷ Escapement Keep a clock alive with your own timing. tap on each pass Strike as the pendulum passes through the gate and you feed it energy; strike anywhere else and you jolt the movement. Your taps are the clock's only power, so a miss slows the beat itself — errors feed back into the thing you're timing against. ♪ Tablature Play the melody over a walking ground. tap on the beat Notes travel a staff toward the strike bar. The bass plays underneath but the melody only sounds when you play it, so a missed note is an audible hole. Music and chart come from the same table of note data — eight chords and a 36-note melody in D minor. ⌗ Portcullis Stop what passes beneath the gatehouse. tap to drop the gate The gate takes half a second to fall, so you drop it where they will be, not where they are. Pairs travel close enough that one well-timed drop takes both, and a pair always shares a colour. ⧗ Weft Weave cloth that records every throw. tap to throw the shuttle Throw the shuttle through the lit shed. Gold rows for perfect throws, linen for ordinary ones, dark frayed rows where you missed — and the knot in each row sits exactly where your shuttle stopped. By row 30 the cloth is a picture of your own consistency. ❧ Pinion Keep falling feathers off the floor. tap to strike The cat scurries to whichever feather is falling fastest; you choose only when to strike. The lower you let one fall, the harder it goes — a late strike scores five times an early tap and leaves almost no margin. ❦ Codex Stack a library, one volume at a time. tap to drop the book A book slides above the tower; drop it and any overhang is sliced away, so the stack narrows with every careless drop. Land within 4px and nothing is trimmed — three in a row and you start winning width back.

How much

Games where the button is held, and the question is quantity rather than instant.

⌒ Span Bridge the gap between towers at sunset. hold to grow, release to drop Hold to extend a plank, release and it falls across. A gold diamond marks dead centre: land the tip within 6px for a bonus and a chime that climbs with the streak. ⌂ Cornice Rooftops in the rain, at night. hold to charge, release to leap Hold to gather the jump and a dotted arc shows where the current power lands you. A brass mark on each roof rewards a centred landing, which takes real calibration rather than minimum effort. ⌁ Bellows Fly the channel between ranks of organ pipes. hold to rise Hold and the wind column lifts you, let go and it doesn't. Deliberately heavy controls — overcorrecting is the main way to die. ⚱ Ewer Fill jars to the mark as the belt carries them past. hold to pour Each jar wants its own level. The belt does not wait, so every extra drop you give one is time the next spends passing unfilled — you're spending a fixed budget of seconds across a queue. ≈ Aqueduct Swing down a sunlit aqueduct over open water. hold the ring, release at the top Hold to catch a hanging ring, swing, and let go at the top of the arc. The course steps downhill, which is what keeps the swing alive — height is the resource you spend. ⊓ Lintel Vault a bar that keeps rising. tap to plant, tap to release Two decisions per attempt: the plant is spatial, judged in pixels against the box; the release is temporal, judged in milliseconds against the top of the swing. Height is the product of both, so a perfect plant with a late release still knocks the bar.

Which way

Games where the button makes a choice that can be wrong.

❖ Chancery Every door wants its own wax. tap to change the seal Carry a seal down a corridor of archive doors; a door opens only while your wax matches, and swings shut the moment you change it. Set it, hold it through the crossing, then cycle for the next. Three seals ahead are shown so you can plan. ⚖ Ballast Sort cargo into a balance until it sits level. tap to throw the diverter Crates come down a chute with their weight in pips; the flap sends each one left or right. Get both pans to exactly equal weight, hold it level, and the porters clear the lot. A real-time partition problem with a 0.16s commitment on every throw. ✛ Transept Two cats, mirrored across a cathedral floor. one tap leaps both A single leap moves both, away from the slab in opposite directions. Blocks sit at different positions above and below, so the jump that saves one can bury the other. Every pair is provably clearable by one leap. ◎ Rotunda Hold the centre of a circular library floor. tap to loose the shot The quill turns on its own; tap to loose a shot along its current bearing. Ink blots converge from the perimeter. The quiver holds six with a slow reload, and a confirmed hit refunds a shot — so accuracy is literally ammunition.