You are a dumpling. The guards are also dumplings.
Hop out of the warehouse without being seen. Get seen and the round is over.
Thirteen hand-built levels. Most are built to be cleared inside a minute.
Every round ends in a word.
ESCAP3D
SPOTT3D
TIM3D OUT
DROPP3D
Being caught does not snap you back to the start. The scene freezes exactly where it went wrong, with the guard's vision cone still drawn on the floor, so you are left sitting there looking at the precise triangle of attention you hopped into.
Then: RETRY, LEVELS, MAIN MENU. It is usually RETRY.
There is no walking.
Hold a direction and the dumpling hops, in discrete little arcs. Travelling means leaving the ground, and leaving the ground is the loudest thing you do.
So there are other ways to move, and every one of them trades something away.
CREEP
Held down, or the stick pushed only half way. Same hop, same rhythm, about two thirds of the pace and a lower arc. A guard only reacts to a creeping landing from inside 1.5 metres.
SNEAK
A toggle, not a hold. You flatten into a roll — 0.6 m tall against a full 1 m standing, which is the only way through a crawl gap. Taken slowly, it is the only genuinely silent way to move in this game.
CHARGE
Held, and the button only appears while you are rolling. Two seconds and three metres of straight line builds the roll to full pace. Steering bleeds it away. Meeting a wall head-on crashes you, stuns you, and makes the second loudest noise in the game.
And the roll is permanently slower than hopping. Deliberately, forever. It is not a better way to travel, it is a lower and quieter one, and it has to sell itself on that.
Red, horned, and hopping.
The guard is a dumpling too. He is red, he has horns, he carries a staff, and he hops exactly the way you do — so you can read his gait as well as his cone.
His cone is sixty degrees wide and it is drawn on the floor in front of him. That drawing is not a picture of the rule, it is built from the rule: the fan shares its mask, its range and its angle with the test that decides whether you were seen. Where a wall cuts the drawing, the wall cut the ray.
A cone drawn wider than it detects is not a bug that was tested for here, it is a shape the code cannot make.
He starts to notice you at 9.5 metres, and the closer you are the faster it fills. Inside 3, a quarter of a second is enough.
Stand perfectly still and you are four times harder to notice — anywhere but inside that inner 3 metres, where stillness buys you nothing.
He hears your landings, and he will walk over and search where the sound was — but hearing alone can never catch you. It is capped below the level only sight can reach. A guard who heard something is a guard out of position, which is very often what you were after.
Once he says huh, he commits. He walks to the last place he saw you and searches it, even if his suspicion drained away on the journey. There is no map under him either: he feels his way round obstacles by bumping into them, so a gap he cannot fit through was never a route he knew about.
Noise, by the way, is something you watch rather than something you hear. The game is silent. A guard's hearing is a number, and the minimap draws it: purple rings spreading out of wherever you last touched down.
The minimap also shows every sentry, how full each one's suspicion is, a ring that grows while your roll charges, and an amber diamond for the exit that becomes an arrowhead on the rim when the exit is off the edge of the map.
It does not show you where a guard is going next. That is the one thing he knows that you are not told.
One button, two verbs, and it tells you which.
From the floor the action button reads JUMP. The moment your own jump is in the air it becomes SMASH.
Come down on a guard from his rear 120 degrees, from about one hop away, and you flatten him.
It is not a way to clear a room. You have to throw it from inside the three metres where he spots you instantly, so if he turns round you are dead before you land. It is the loudest thing in the game. And he gets back up: about a second and a half lying flat, then three and a half seconds of visible reassembly you can stand there and watch count down.
What a smash buys you is roughly five seconds of guard-shaped hole in a patrol.
There is no cooldown on it. The risk is the price.
13 levels, three clocks, 39 stars.
Thirteen levels, every one of them built, unlocked in order as you clear the one before.
- Bottleneck
- The Warehouse
- The Open Yard
- Thread the Needle
- Crawling
- One Way
- The Stairway
- Locker Ladder
- Around the Rosey
- Flat Escalator
- Gridlock
- Patrol Junction
- Four-Way Watch
The opposition grows, but not as a straight ramp — Crawling puts two in your way and One Way drops straight back to one. Flat Escalator has six.
Rounds are short. Twelve of the thirteen set a target of sixty seconds or less, and the median target is forty-five. This is a bus-stop game that happens to be about patience.
Three clocks
Only one of them can hurt you. The limit ends the round, and it counts down in words as well as colour — LEFT, then HURRY, then OUT OF TIME. The target is the time to beat and missing it costs you nothing you had. The gold is the fast one, between 15 and 40 seconds.
39 stars
Three a level: one for getting out at all, one for the target, one for the gold. A grade you have earned only ever goes up.
9 unlocks
Six are new looks for your dumpling. The other three are worlds. The last one is bought at nine banked stars, so the wardrobe finishes long before the stars do.
Four worlds
SECURITY, DIABLO, MEDIEVAL — each priced at a full three-star clear of one of the first three levels. The fourth, DUMPLING, is the one you start in and the only one a new save has.
72 dumplings
Six body colours, four faces and three things to put on your head. Seven of the thirteen options are free from the first launch, and a mannequin tries each one on without committing you to it.
22 lockers
Across five of the levels, and you can get inside one. It will not muffle you, so a guard who heard you dive in comes and searches the cabinet you are standing in. It hides you from his eyes and from nothing else.
12 crawl gaps
Across three levels, marked by yellow barrels stacked on pallets. Rolling, you fit. Standing up, that is a wall.
What this actually is.
Spott3D is a single-player stealth-puzzle game for iPhone. It plays in landscape, with on-screen controls — a stick, SMASH, SNEAK and CHARGE — that mirror for left-handed play and have sliders for stick size and button opacity. It is built in Godot 4.7.1, on the mobile renderer, with Jolt physics.
The camera is fixed. A straight-on three-quarter view that trails you without inheriting the bounce, and never rotates, so a corridor always lines up with the way you push the stick.
It plays offline. There is no account to make and nothing to sign in to. Your progress, your settings, your dumpling and your chosen world live in one file on your phone, written all at once so a bad moment cannot leave it half-finished.
Twelve settings in three groups, and no audio section, because the game has no sound in it. Guard vision cones have a colour-blind palette. Motion can be reduced. The clock that can end your run is the one thing you are not allowed to hide, because hiding a stopwatch is a preference and hiding the rule that ends your round is a trap.
Coming to iPhone. There is no release date to announce — when there is one, it will be on this page.