Experiment 016 · botanical mystery

The Garden That Remembers You.

A secluded estate above the sea. Someone has saved your place.
We explored the idea of a mystery garden adventure with GPT 6 Astra and Opus. Both invite you to slow down, look closely and wonder whether the garden is looking back.

The Astra garden in the browser, with a fountain courtyard, flowering beds and a glass conservatory in warm coastal light.

▶ Enter the garden · GPT 6 Astra

Follow the long way

GPT 6 Astra

An invitation leads you around a seaside estate. Study it through a botanical lens, follow the garden circuit and gather the observations that open the next part of the mystery.

Three.js · discovery-led progression · procedural coast and ocean

Before you enter · controls

WASD walks; mouse, arrows or click-drag looks around. E interacts, Q toggles the lens and I opens the invitation. Escape pauses. Sound, sensitivity, camera sway and detail are adjustable; touch movement buttons are included.

The Opus garden running in the browser: sunlit stone, planted beds and the estate above the sea.

▶ Enter the garden · Opus

The garden pays attention

Opus

A slow botanical mystery that notices where you return, what you inspect and when you look behind you. Five movements mix elapsed time with your actions; small inconsistencies creep into the beautiful surroundings.

Raw WebGL 2 · habit-driven variations · custom multipass renderer

Before you enter · controls

WASD walks; hold Shift for a brisker pace. The mouse looks around; drag to look if pointer capture is unavailable. Hold E for the lens and press F to interact (right/left mouse also work with pointer capture). I opens the invitation. Escape pauses and releases the pointer. Designed for keyboard and mouse; allow time for the garden to change.

Under the leaves

Two ways to make curiosity playable.

The gardens generate their geometry, surfaces and sound in code. The interesting difference is how they connect what you notice to what happens next.

Implementation observations · story discoveries kept out
System	GPT 6 Astra	Opus
Progression	Discoveries unlock the next step. A marked circuit and an objective note keep the route readable; waiting alone does not open the conservatory.	Five authored movements blend elapsed time and player actions. Repeated visits, inspections and glances behind select different variations.
The lens	A separate magnified render and narrative inspection state turn looking closely into an action the story can recognize.	A second render target has its own visibility layer. The magnified world can disagree with the ordinary one, rather than merely enlarge it.
Garden and coast	Instanced leaves, carved procedural forms, generated stone surfaces and a planted limestone headland. Crossing Gerstner swells meet shore foam anchored to terrain elevation.	Lathed stonework, fluted columns, branch tubes and shader-animated planting. Startup voxel sampling bakes ambient occlusion into the architecture.
Light and sound	Bloom, contact shading and light shafts on the fine setting; lower detail drops expensive passes. Synthesized ambience accompanies the walk.	Shadow, reflection, main and optional lens passes feed a custom post-processing chain. A shared attention dial changes wind, light, reflections and synthesized ambience together.

Challenge notes

Make the player distrust a beautiful place.

← Back to Notes

01 / Opus · unseen changes

Wait until nobody is looking.

An obvious object swap reads as a glitch. Opus queues selected changes until the target is outside the view or hidden behind architecture. The effect lives in the gap between what you remember and what you find when you turn back.

02 / Both · the lens

Magnification can be a second account of reality.

The lens is not just a zoomed screenshot. Both builds render a separate view and connect inspection to the story. Opus also separates visibility layers, letting the two views disagree without replacing the entire scene.

03 / Astra · readable mystery

Keep the mystery. Lose the guessing about controls.

Astra makes observations explicit progression conditions, provides a circuit to follow and debounces repeated inspection. You can wonder about the estate without also wondering whether a timer, a missed click or an invisible trigger has stalled the game.

04 / Opus · coupled atmosphere

Let the systems become suspicious together.

A shared attention dial feeds several rendering parameters. Wind grows more coherent while shadows and reflections change character. The unease comes from the relationship between familiar effects, not from simply turning the lights off.