Relay Zero II: The Varnish

An oil painting of a spiral relay tower on a crag above a Bruegel valley of red-roofed villages, fields and a winding river; the right third of the land has been drained to brown-grey grisaille, with tiny brass machines along the edge. — The key art, painted in oils on the claude-paint easel. Left of the line the valley still has its colour. Right of it, the Varnish has been.

Adventure: Room by room
Views: 3D over the shoulder or 2D map
Restore: 114 painted scenes
Saves: Three browser slots

A Zelda-style adventure inside an Old-Master painting

Relay Zero was a room-by-room colony adventure in the spirit of the original NES The Legend of Zelda. The second game keeps every room, rule and secret, then hangs the whole map in a gallery. The valley is a Bruegel panorama, the skies are Rubens and Tintoretto, and the vaults are lit like a candlelit altarpiece.

The machines are the Varnish: brass clockwork beetles, linen-winged ornithopters and bronze river gargoyles. Wherever they roam, the scene dries to a brown grisaille underpainting. You play a wood-elf apprentice with a blade of burning light, and a scene only gets its colour back when every machine in it is broken.

Restored scenes stay restored. The count sits at the top of the screen: 114 surface scenes, each glazed back one fight at a time.

What changed from the first game

A 3D view that's fun to play. The first-person camera of the original 3D build is now an over-the-shoulder chase camera set high above the field. The apprentice is a jointed figure built from small voxels: she strides, swings her arms, faces where she runs, and swings the cutter like an animated film character. She sinks into her back leg and cocks the blade, then her hips lead, her chest and shoulder follow, and her elbow snaps straight last, with a light trail. Her whole body squashes and stretches on a spring as she lands, strikes and gets hit. A cut snaps to the nearest machine in front of her. Scenery between the camera and the hero is stippled away, so walls and tree crowns never hide a fight. Machines appear as crisp pixel sprites standing in the 3D world.
The whole game, at last. The first Relay Zero had only a few kinds of machine and no bosses. Now every monster, boss and item of the original exists, translated tick for tick and repainted: darknuts that parry, jellies that split, hands that drag you back to the door, a four-headed Gleeok whose cut necks fly loose, and the Grand Varnisher, invisible until struck and finished only by a silver arrow in a room that starts in darkness. The boomerang, bow, candles, whistle, wand, raft and fold-bridge all work, and the ending plays out to the second quest.
Something to do while you stand still. Wait a few seconds and the apprentice turns to the camera and passes the time. She starts with four: a long stretch and a yawn, a look out over the horizon, a butterfly that lands on her finger, and a reed pipe with a little tune. Every item you find teaches her one more: she kneels to stroke the cutter with a whetstone, juggles a powder ball and fumbles the last throw, warms her hands over a candle, dances a whistle jig, and presses a boulder overhead before flexing. There are 17 idles in all, and the Gallery lists the ones you have unlocked.
Hits you can feel. Each hit gets a short hit-stop and a camera shake, and broken machines throw brass gears. Restoring a scene sends a glaze of light across the screen with a bell chime.
Painted in oils. Seven oil paintings were made on the easel: the key art, a seamless sky wrapped around the 3D world, four cut-scene panels and a sheet of painted cut-out actors. In 3D, an oil-paint screen filter (a Kuwahara filter with stroke texture, linen weave, an aged-varnish grade and a chiaroscuro vignette) turns the voxel world into brushwork.
Pixel art, repainted. The 2D map's sprites and terrain use an earth palette of lead white, ochre, vermilion, verdigris and umber. The hero is a slim wood elf with coloured outlines, the bitmap font is set in a parchment-and-gilt UI, and every frame is a 9-slice pixel border.
Action cut scenes. The cut scenes are The Varnish Descends, The Ion Cutter, Into the Frame, Relay Restored and Fallen. In each, the camera pans and pushes into a painting while painted actors run, leap and slash across it, with sparks, gears, flashes and typed captions. All of them can be skipped and replayed from the Gallery.
A room you can hear. Each kind of place has its own looping atmosphere: meadow, forest, coast, highland, ruins, grotto, vault and the deep vaults. Each one is picked to match what the room is made of. All 25 effects were chosen from Eric's SFX library by reading their waveforms and spectrograms.
A loader that tells you what broke. The game no longer gives up on a stale cache. Every file shows up as a square as it is checked against the release manifest and fetched by its content hash. A file report names anything missing, and three buttons offer Try again, Reset game cache and Continue anyway.

Two GameLab ideas, combined

From FIELDWORK and Island V3Repair that the world shows you. In those games a fix travels downstream or brings a station back to life. Here, beating a room glazes it from grisaille back into colour, and it stays that way.
From The Ashwicke GalleriesExhibits as doorways. Dungeon entrances are gilded frames, and each vault is a painting inside the painting, entered through the Into the Frame cut scene.
Carried in from Waymark and HorizonThe pixel-art kit (palette, sprites, bitmap font, 9-slice frames) and the easel painting workflow behind the site's Horizon footer.

How to play

A pixel loader checks the game files first. At the title, press Enter, register a name (arrow keys choose letters, Z enters them, Shift to END, then Enter), pick your slot and step into the painting. The opening cut scene plays once per save.

Control	Action
WASD / Arrows	Run. In 3D, movement is relative to the camera.
Z / J / Space	Strike with the Ion Cutter once you have it.
X / K / E	Use the tool in the B slot.
Mouse drag or click	Turn the 3D camera.
M	Swap between the 3D painted view and the playable 2D map.
Enter / Escape	Inventory and menus / pause. In a cut scene, Enter or Z advances and Escape skips.

Touch: left stick to move, drag the world to turn the view, A to cut, B for your tool. Gamepad: both sticks, triggers to act, Y to swap views.

Settings has a first-person camera for anyone who preferred the original 3D view, a reduced-effects switch that turns off the oil-paint filter, and separate volumes for effects and room atmospheres.

Inside the painting

The wood-elf apprentice, copper-haired in a green tunic and crimson scarf, walks a sunlit stone path through the restored starting valley, built from voxels and finished with oil-paint brushwork. — Over the shoulder in the 3D view.

A forest scene drained to brown grisaille. The apprentice, still in full colour, swings the cutter at two brass clockwork beetles under a banner reading The Varnish holds this scene. — A scene the Varnish still holds, before the glaze.

A cut-scene frame painted in oils: the white-bearded hermit hands over the blazing Ion Cutter, with the parchment caption: Cut the brass, and the colour runs free. — From the cut scene *The Ion Cutter*.

The playable 2D map in an earth palette: ochre field, umber rock walls and the small wood-elf sprite. — The 2D map is still fully playable. Press M to swap.

Build notes

Read the October 15 Advisory Hour post about the painted world, the apprentice, and the launch video.

Read the design notes and the changelog. The paintings' Lua sources, the sprite-repaint and font tools, and the sound sources with waveform plates are kept in the project's tools/ and source/ folders.

The game runs in your browser with Three.js. The source simulation from the first game still decides every hit and every door. Everything new (the camera, the hero rig, restoration, cut scenes, atmospheres and the paint filter) is presentation layered on top of it.