Shadows of Ra — The maze rewrites itself every move

What is Shadows of Ra — The maze rewrites itself every move

Shadows of Ra is played on a stone courtyard, seven tiles square in the first chamber and eleven once you are deep underground. Blocks of stone stand on the floor and each throws a shadow over the tiles behind it. Among them lie golden ankhs and a gate that stays sealed until you have taken them all. One rule holds the game together: sunlight burns. A turn that ends on a lit tile raises your Heat by one, a turn that ends in shadow lowers it by one, and the third lit turn in a row scorches you and costs an Ankh.

What makes it a puzzle rather than a maze is that the floor is not a fixed map. The sun occupies one of eight positions around the courtyard and advances one position after every action you take, so the shadows swing forty-five degrees each turn and return to where they began every eight moves. The safe ground under your feet is a function of how many moves you have played. Waiting is a legal move: it turns the sun without moving you, the only way to change the shadows while staying put, and it cools you by one Heat if you are already in shade.

How to play

1. Move with the arrow keys, WASD, a swipe, or a tap on any tile beside you. Every action advances the sun one position and swings all the shadows.
2. Only shadow is safe. A turn ending in sunlight adds one Heat, a turn ending in shadow removes one, and the third Heat costs you an Ankh.
3. Collect every golden ankh to unseal the gate, then step onto it. Chambers grow from seven tiles square to eleven and the shadows shorten as you descend.
4. Press Space, or the hourglass, to wait: the sun turns and you stay put. You have three Ankhs; the Daily Challenge is five chambers.

Strategies that work

• Heat is a budget of two, not a wall. A lit turn adds one and a shaded turn subtracts one, so sun, sun, shade repeats without burning. The killer is the third lit turn in a row. Count the tiles to the next shadow before you leave cover: two is always affordable.
• Route along the stones. Every walkable tile that touches an obelisk on one of its four sides falls into shadow at some point in the eight-position cycle, while open floor in the middle can stay lit the whole way round. Hug the blocks and cover is never far.
• Shadow does not linger. A tile is typically shaded for one or two of the eight sun positions, and two thirds of shaded stretches last a single turn. Wait to let a shadow arrive on the tile you want next, not to hide on the tile where you already stand.
• Read the dashed turquoise outlines. Foresight, on by default in Settings, marks tiles that are lit now but shaded after your next action, which is exactly the set that is free to step onto. Chaining one dashed tile to the next is how a long crossing costs no Heat.
• Think twice before restarting a chamber. It forfeits flawless and resets your flawless chain, and that chain is the multiplier: ten per cent per chained chamber, up to double. Efficiency pays thirty-five per move under par and flawless pays two hundred and fifty, so one Heat is often cheaper.

A little history

Shadows of Ra is an original game written for puzzle-me.com. It belongs to the family of grid puzzles where the hazard is cyclic and deterministic rather than random: the board changes on a schedule you can read, so a death is a planning error and never bad luck. Two things in it are genuinely Egyptian, the ankh, the hieroglyph that means life, and Ra, the sun god of the Egyptian pantheon. Everything else was designed here. Every chamber is generated and then solved by exhaustive search over position, sun angle, heat and ankhs taken, so none is ever unsolvable.

Frequently asked questions