you mark everyone who comes through the door so you can tell them apart later, and this morning a man walked in wearing a mark in your own hand that you have no memory of making.

THE MARK IS YOURS

you draw it yourself, freehand, on the arm of every arrival. the game keeps your actual strokes: where the pen went. how fast it was moving. where it stopped. 

every mark in the book is genuinely yours, because you are the one who made it.

then people start coming back, and you're the only thing standing between this settlement and whoever wants in and whatever else they might be bringing in.

WHAT A COPY CANNOT REACH

a forger gets the shape right. shape is the easy part, and the overlay tool

will cheerfully tell you two marks are the same shape. what a copy cannot reach is what the movement did.

ENDS. your pen is already moving when it lands and still moving when it leaves, so your strokes come to a point. a traced line is set down and lifted, and ends blunt.

WEIGHT. you write at speed, and a fast line is a thin line. a tracer works slowly, and a slow line is a fat one.

WOBBLE. a hand that is writing wanders in long curves. a hand steering along a model shakes in short ones.

POOLS. ink gathers wherever a hand stopped. yours stops where you meant it to. theirs stops wherever they looked back at what they were copying.

all four are there under the glasses. not one of them is there in an outline.

THREE NIGHTS

day one establishes that the marks are yours. day two brings a copy, and a faded mark you have to put back on, which shows you with your own hand that a hand is never identical twice. day three brings entries written by somebody else's shift, a page the water got into, and less time to work in.

the book can be replayed, because you drew it and the pen was watched. an arm cannot be replayed. it is only ink. the ending turns that over. you cannot play people. or, are you?

IT COMES OUT DIFFERENT

sixty names, and who arrives, what they say, who comes back and which of them is lying are drawn fresh every run. honest arrivals and forgers speak from the same lines on purpose. the dialogue is never a tell. the ink is always the evidence.

CONTROLS

mouse only. hold the left button on the arm to draw, inside the corner marks. hover the arm, then hover the page, and both stay in the glasses underneath so you can put skin and paper side by side. escape opens instructions, controls and a gallery of everything you have drawn.

the arm will not stay out forever. mark it the way you would sign something, not the way you would copy something.

MADE FOR/WITH

made for the Brackeys Game Jam 2026

godot 4. every mark, every sound and every pixel of the table is generated at runtime. there are no image files and no audio files in this game.

the room tone goes further out of tune the more of the book you get wrong, and the room arrives a second time whenever a mark in your own hand does.

type is old standard tt by alexey kryukov, under the SIL open font license. everything else is original.