Planned Release Date: Sep 22, 2026

About This Game

A cozy nonogram adventure beneath a living dungeon.

You are a naturalist of the Grotto Guild, roped down into the green dark beneath the city to do one thing: see what lives there, and record it. Every chamber holds a single specimen — a glowing flower, a blind cave fish, a frost-grown fern, a sleeping drowned king — and the only way to record it is to solve the picture-logic puzzle hidden in its shape.

Solve by logic. Reveal by light.

Every puzzle is a nonogram (also known as picross or griddlers): read the number clues, ink the right cells, and the silhouette of a real specimen emerges from the grid. Finish it and your sketch blooms to life in a cascade of flipping cells — the drawing becoming the living thing.

100 specimens. 10 floors. One continuous descent.

From the mossy first hollow down through drowned causeways, glass caverns, ice galleries and lakes of slow fire, to the luminous heart of the world. Each floor opens and closes with a beat of story, and the deeper you go, the stranger the things you find — ending on a finale you'll want to reach for yourself.

Cozy by design — no fail states, no guessing.

There is no game over and no clock you must beat. Every single puzzle is guaranteed solvable by pure logic alone, verified by a solver before it ever ships — so you are never left stuck, guessing. Set it down any time; your progress saves automatically and waits right where you left it.

Hunt, if you want a thrill.

Opt into timed hunts to catch fleeing creatures and earn rare and epic entries for your journal. Entirely optional, never required — the cozy path is always open.

Features

• 100 hand-crafted nonogram / picross puzzles, each a piece of pixel art you reveal

• A continuous, gently-told story across 10 themed floors

• Guaranteed-fair puzzles — solvable by logic, never by guessing

• A field journal, dungeon map, and guild ranks that fill as you explore

• A satisfying two-stage reveal, with sound, on every solve

• Optional timed hunts for rare and epic finds

• Auto-save, colour-independent puzzles, and a calm, no-pressure pace

A game for a warm drink and a slow evening.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

The developer of The Grotto Index used generative AI tools during development to help create some of the game's visual assets, including specimen pixel art and illustrations. All AI-assisted content was reviewed, edited, and curated by the developer before being included in the game. No content is generated by AI during gameplay — every puzzle, image, and piece of text in the shipped game is fixed and was finalized before release.