Lantern Keeper
Catch falling fuel. The dimmer your flame, the less you can see.
How to Play Lantern Keeper
- Move under the round amber fuel and catch it in the brazier above your head.
- The flame burns down by itself, so standing still is never safe.
- Dark magenta squares are soot. Catching one costs you a quarter of your flame.
- A catch pays more the lower your flame has burned — one point at full, three when it is nearly out.
Controls
| Keyboard | Arrow keys or A and D to move |
|---|---|
| Touch | Drag anywhere to move |
Tips
- The lit circle shrinks as the flame weakens, so running low costs you warning time. That is the trade the scoring asks you to make: topping up early is safe and cheap, while working in the dark is where the points are.
About Lantern Keeper
Catch falling fuel in the brazier you carry overhead. Your flame burns down on its own, the lit circle closes in as it fades, and a catch pays most when it is nearly out. It runs directly in your browser with no download or sign-up, on desktop and mobile alike.
Design notes: how Lantern Keeper was built
The darkness is a pressure device, not a blindfold. The vignette closes in as fuel drops — light radius is H * (0.32 + 0.44 * min(1, fuel)) — but the darkest stop in the gradient is capped at 88% opacity rather than solid black, on purpose. Falling objects stay faintly visible at all times, because dying to something genuinely invisible is not difficulty, it is a coin toss.
Four separate curves ramp at four different rates: fall speed saturates around forty seconds, spawn gap around fifty-five, the proportion of soot around eighty-one, and the fuel drain not until roughly five minutes. Staggering them means the game never has a single moment where it obviously gets harder — the texture of the pressure keeps changing while the numbers move underneath.
Two implementation details that fixed real problems. The darkness gradient is generated once at unit radius and scaled with a canvas transform rather than regenerated every frame, which removed a steady stream of garbage collection pauses. And spawn positions use a golden-ratio low-discrepancy sequence instead of the usual sine-based scatter — measured, the sine version clustered drops at the screen edges and left the centre lane noticeably under-served, which players would have felt as unfairness without ever being able to name it.
More of these in the dev notes.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I tell fuel from soot in Lantern Keeper?
By shape as well as colour. Fuel is a round glowing orb, soot is a flat magenta square with a dark centre, so the two stay apart even if you cannot see the colours.
Why is the screen getting darker?
The lit circle is tied to how strong your flame is. As fuel runs down the darkness closes in, which is a warning rather than a blindfold — falling pieces stay faintly visible outside the light.
Does the game ever stop getting harder?
No. Fall speed, spawn rate and the share of soot all settle within the first minute and a half, but the rate your flame burns keeps climbing well past that.
Browse every game on Neon Arcade · read the dev notes behind them