Cryptune is a daily music word puzzle. A handful of cryptic clue tiles, each hiding one word, which together spell out an artist, a song or an album.
A cryptic crossword clue and a music quiz question do the same thing from opposite directions. The crossword clue hides a word in plain sight and dares you to see it. The quiz question names something you either know or you do not. Cryptune came from wondering what would happen if you put one inside the other.
What happens, it turns out, is a very particular kind of double click. First the individual words fall out of the clues, which is a small satisfaction on its own. Then the words arrange themselves into something you recognise, and that is a completely different feeling, less like solving and more like remembering. Two tiles reading "freeze" and "act on stage" give you COLD and PLAY, and then a half second later they give you Coldplay, and that half second is the entire game.
The best puzzles are the ones where the clues are honest but the answer still ambushes you. Nothing has been hidden. Every word you need is on the screen. You simply cannot see it yet.
Cryptune pairs Playfair Display, a proper editorial serif, with a monospaced face for the clue tiles and the numbers. That contrast is deliberate. The serif belongs to a music magazine and the monospace belongs to a puzzle, and the game sits between the two. The amber accent came from the warm glow of old hi-fi displays and stayed because it looked right against both the light and dark themes.
The tiles flip rather than fade. That was worth the extra effort, because revealing a clue should feel like a decision with a cost, and a flip feels like a decision in a way that a fade does not.
Cryptune is a small, self-contained web game written in React. There are no accounts, no logins and no servers holding your data. Your stats, streaks and results are stored in your own browser using localStorage, which means they belong to you and to the device you play on.
The trade-off is honest and worth stating: because there is no account, your stats do not follow you from your phone to your laptop. Each device keeps its own record. For a small daily puzzle, that felt like the right compromise.
Every puzzle is written by hand. The answers were chosen first, drawn from across seven decades of popular music, and then each one was taken apart word by word to see what could be hidden and how. Some titles give themselves up immediately. Others resist for a long time, and a few had to be abandoned entirely because no honest clue could be written for them.
There is a deliberate mix of difficulty across the calendar. Roughly a fifth of the puzzles are gentle, most sit in the middle, and a fifth are genuinely hard. That balance matters more than it sounds, because a daily game that is always hard becomes homework and a daily game that is never hard becomes wallpaper.
Clue writing has its own rules that emerged over time. A clue should never be the dictionary definition, because a dictionary definition is not a puzzle, it is a lookup. Variety within a single puzzle matters, so a good day mixes a synonym with a soundalike rather than repeating the same trick three times. And anagrams, which are the rarest type in the game, are the ones that get the most affectionate messages from players.
If you want to see how the clues actually break down, the clue school pulls real examples out of the game and works through them.
Cryptune is made by Morning Sun Games, an independent one-person studio based in the United Kingdom, building small daily puzzle games for people who like music and words.
It is very much a solo project, made in evenings and at weekends. Everything you see here, the code, the puzzles, the artwork and the slightly obsessive fiddling with tile spacing, comes from the same person, which is either charming or alarming depending on the day.
You can find the studio's other games at morningsungames.co.uk.
Cryptune is free and always will be. If you play it regularly and want to help cover hosting, there is a Ko-fi link in the Support panel inside the game. There is no obligation whatsoever and nothing is locked behind it.
Got a suggestion, a bug, or a title that absolutely has to be a puzzle? The contact page is the place.