Play Talos Unbound: The Brazen Giant — a free screw and bolt puzzle of Greek myth, in your browser

A free browser screw puzzle built on Greek myth. Talos, the bronze giant, has bolted himself shut with Europa inside — unscrew him plate by plate across 30 chapters and four acts before he reaches deep water. Ad-free, no download.

Talos Unbound: The Brazen Giant is a free browser-based screw puzzle built on Greek myth, and it is played one armour plate at a time. Hephaestus forged Talos of bronze and gave him to Europa, so that the sea would never take her twice in one lifetime. Then Medea whispered that Europa had already been taken — and the giant, who had never been given a way to tell a rumour from a fact, sealed every plate of himself shut with her still inside and started walking into the water. You are the fitter the bronze-workers' festival leaves on the beach every year, with a wrench and no instructions.

What makes this more than a tray of loose screws is that it is an occlusion puzzle. The plates are physical objects lying on top of each other: a bolt only exists while the plate that holds it is exposed, a plate only lets go when every bolt in it is out, and every plate you take away changes which bolts you can reach next. On top of that sits the rail — the genre's parking pressure reduced to one clean rule, a bolt set down is a bolt dropped — and a chapter generator that proves a clean dismantle is always possible before the chapter is allowed to ship. Thirty chapters across four acts, an endless forge that sends a new giant every cycle, and a tap par that was measured by replaying a recorded plan through the engine your own finger uses.

How to play

1. Turn bolts. Tap a bolt and it spins out. If its metal matches the open bronze bloom, it flies straight in; if it does not, it goes onto the rail. The bloom at the front of the queue is the only one taking bolts.
2. Plates fall when they are empty. A plate lets go the moment every bolt in it is out — and only then is whatever it was covering reachable. The screws of the plate underneath are already there, waiting to be revealed.
3. Never fill the rail. A full rail is not a loss on its own, but turning a bolt that has nowhere to go is: that one move ends the chapter. Every chapter can be finished with an empty rail, and the second star is for finding it.
4. Spend embers on frozen bolts. A frozen bolt will not turn until an ember is spent on it, and embers are what a plate gives you when it falls — so the giant pays for his own dismantling.
5. Work down to the ichor nail. The nail is the deepest bolt in the chapter, and reaching it is what finishes it. You do not have to take the giant apart completely — only far enough to reach the nail.
6. Carry the relic out clean. One relic bolt is hidden in every chapter. It is worth the third star when you take it out without spending a hint.

Controls

The rules, exactly

Screw puzzle, parking jam and unscrew games

The four acts of the campaign

Why par is a number you can trust

Every chapter shows a tap par, and it is measured rather than invented. A chapter is built from its seed in a fixed order: the plates are laid down largest first, a valid dismantling order is read off the occlusion graph, the goal is chosen as the deepest bolt on the board, the ballast behind the nail is thrown away, and only then are the metals handed out — along the order, one run per bloom. The plan that the generator records is then replayed through the same engine your finger uses, one tap at a time, and a chapter is rejected outright if the replay disagrees with the plan by so much as one tap. Par is the number of taps that replay took to reach the nail. It cannot be optimistic, because it was not estimated by a designer, and it cannot be pessimistic, because a better order was already searched for before the chapter was accepted.

The story, briefly

Hephaestus forged Talos and gave him one vein, one nail, and one job. The job was Europa; the vein ran from his ankle to his neck and was sealed with a single nail of ichor at the top of the spine. Medea's whisper was the only lie the giant ever heard, and because nothing in his construction could tell a rumour from a fact, he treated it as a fact — and made himself into the lock. The campaign is the fitter's year: the ankle plates at the waterline in Act I, the seized verdigris of the hip in Act II, the frozen ichor lines of the torso in Act III, and the chest where Europa waits behind nine plates and a barred window in Act IV. Undoing the whisper takes the whole giant. The epilogue puts him back together with the hinge on the inside.

Strategy that actually works

• Work top-down, but check the rail first. Before turning any bolt, count what is on the rail and what the open bloom takes. The losing move is always a bolt you could have left for later.
• Empty plates are worth more than they look. A plate that falls gives you an ember, and an ember is the only way through a frozen bolt — so a plate you can drop now is a frozen bolt you can turn later.
• Break chains from the bound end. A chained plate will not let go until the plate it is bound to has gone, so the bound plate's bolts come first, always.
• Save hints for the chest. One hint costs the relic star whether you spend it on chapter 1 or chapter 30 — so spend it where the board is deepest.
• Undo is free of the star. Only hints cost the third star. An undo costs one of three undos and nothing else, so use it the moment a bolt lands on the rail.
• Watch the bloom queue. The bloom behind the open one tells you which metal is coming next; turning that metal early onto the rail is how rails fill.

Technical notes

Everything here is generated: there is no image on the board, no audio file, and no third-party script. The plates are Canvas 2D — brushed metal, seeded patina, rivets, and a meander band drawn per plate — the bolts are engraved with one shape per metal so the puzzle never leans on colour alone, and every sound is synthesised with the Web Audio API at the moment it is needed. The whole board is one fixed field of 1000 by 1200 that scales into whatever box the player gives it, which is why a wide, short player and a tall phone both show the entire giant. The chapter suite rebuilds all thirty boards from their seeds and asserts the fairness contract before anything ships: every recorded plan replays through the real engine, no bolt ever seats in a bloom of the wrong metal, the rail cap is the only way to lose, seized bolts take exactly two turns, frozen bolts refuse to turn without an ember, and chained plates hold until the plate they are bound to has gone. Progress, stars, relics and the forge ledger are stored in your own browser under talos.save.v1; nothing is uploaded, because there is no server.

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