Scentle

Scentle asks you to name a perfume from its olfactory pyramid. The screen opens on the full composition, split into three numbered levels (top, heart and base notes), with most ingredients carrying a labeled family: woody, spicy, citrus, animalic, gourmand. Nothing else at the start, hence the rules formula: you start cold. A progress bar at the top of the page shows the tiers left to unlock, and a text field simply invites you to type a perfume name.

1. Read the displayed pyramid: the top, heart and base notes are all visible from the first try, with their counts and, for most, their fragrance family.
2. Type a perfume name into the input field.
3. If you are wrong, check the tier that has just opened on the progress bar, then try again.
4. Use the skip button if you really can't think of anything: it opens the next tier immediately, at the cost of one attempt.

Because it's a riddle played with a vocabulary you didn't know you had. The pyramid is given in full from the start, so failure never comes from a lack of information but from an inability to link materials to a name, and each failed attempt turns the puzzle into a documentary inquiry into an object you thought you knew only by its bottle.

The game doesn't color anything and doesn't say whether you're getting warmer. It expands the file. Each failed attempt opens the next tier on the progress bar, which goes from the notes to the bio, the country, the house, the collection, then an unnamed tier before the final verdict. The attempt counter remains displayed at the bottom left, alongside the number of attempts remaining.

Perfume of the Day

One puzzle per day, replaced at midnight, with a number and a date in the header. Streaks of consecutive days are tracked.

• A failed guess and a skip cost exactly the same, one attempt, and open the same tier. The difference is that a guess can win. Skipping is therefore only useful if no name comes to mind, which the rules frankly state: use it when you're guessing blind.
• The labeled fragrance families are often more useful than ingredient names for situating an era and a register: it's the distribution across the three levels that reveals the perfume's genre, not the presence of any particular material.
• Read the progress bar backwards before you start. Knowing that the house and the collection only arrive late indicates how many attempts you can afford to spend blindly before the file becomes truly informative.