Try it live Description
Gift No.188 is a quiet cycling narrative game. You ride a single figure-eight loop that crosses itself once, through mist-layered mountains, stopping at 16 roadside stations. Five of them hold a fragment you can only collect on your third visit.
Miles Lu repairs broken things for a living. His mother disappeared on this road six years ago and left him the family business: the Eighteenth Station inn, empty ever since. Then a lawyer's letter gives him 30 days to open it, or the land will be taken by law, and someone would like what sits under the hot spring. The road is not empty. Four chiseled steles along the way say it: the keeper remembers the road, not himself; you keep the way home for everyone, and the price is that no one remembers you. On one of them the letters have been scraped off, leaving half a 188.
Between the fragments are five small joys, cloud, tea, zither, bamboo and bird, each wanting three visits before it gives anything up. There is a budget you can only solve by subtraction, and composure that only ever falls, with one way back up, sold at the tea stall. No combat, no fail state, no cutscenes: every line arrives while the bicycle is still moving, and a run takes 20–30 minutes. At the end, the 15 fragments you collected are pressed into a postcard you can write on and export as a PNG, or leave blank. Then you choose to Leave the Door or Let Go. The other one stays empty.
It is made for weak hardware on purpose. The stations' roofs, columns, plinths and railings are generated in code, every surface is computed in shaders, and the build contains no texture bytes. Three quality tiers cut internal render resolution, shadows and vegetation range; the low tier removes grass entirely and spends that budget on resolution, because grass is fill-rate bound and a softer image hurts more than thinner grass. There is no post-processing: the composure vignette is a DOM overlay that costs no GPU time. Capability detection reads your GPU string, shows you its reasoning, and then never changes tier on its own.
The author made it as a gift for themselves and for everyone who has left their hometown. It runs in the browser in English and Chinese, with audio generated by MiniMax models.
How Tripo was used
Tripo generated 15 of the game's 23 3D assets.
- Vehicles: the bicycle (26 parts), the motorcycle (69 parts) and the skateboard (5 parts).
- Scenery: the five fragment stations, pines, bamboo clusters, shrubs and two modern buildings.
- Bringing the rides to life: in Blender, the author rebuilt a two-bone IK from measured pivot positions and baked the pedaling cycle into an animation, so the rider's feet stay on the pedals. In three.js, a covariance Jacobi eigendecomposition measures the wheel axles and spin axes from the geometry to align them, and the handlebars follow the front wheel's steering.
