Gradientle is a free daily color puzzle game. Every day, a new scrambled gradient appears. Your job is to drag the tiles back into order until the colors blend perfectly from corner to corner. The four corner tiles are locked in place - they show you exactly where the gradient starts and ends. Everything in between is up to you.

One puzzle per day. Everyone gets the same one. The puzzle resets at midnight, and your progress is saved locally so you can pick up where you left off.

Whether you're competitive, procrastinating for a few minutes, or just looking for a low-stakes daily ritual - we hope it fits.

The science behind the gradient

Most color software works in RGB - three channels that correspond to how your monitor emits light. RGB is fine for screens but not great for color puzzles. A "halfway" blend between red and blue in RGB gives you a murky grey-purple that doesn't look halfway between anything to a human eye.

Gradientle uses OKLAB, a perceptual color space developed by Björn Ottosson. In OKLAB, equal numerical steps look equal to human eyes. A gradient from warm orange to cool blue passes through a visually balanced midpoint - it actually looks right. This is why Gradientle gradients feel smooth and satisfying rather than muddy: the math is designed around how you perceive color, not just how your GPU stores it.

The practical result is that every puzzle has a clear visual logic. If a tile feels slightly too warm, too cool, too bright, or too muted relative to its neighbors, trust that instinct - your eye is working correctly.

Why daily?

Daily games create a specific kind of shared experience: one puzzle that everyone solves together, on the same day. You can compare your result with friends, talk about which gradient was tricky, and debate whether today's was harder than yesterday's.

The "one a day" constraint also removes pressure. You show up, solve it, and you're done. There's no level grind, no unlocks, no streak anxiety beyond the natural kind.

Color puzzles specifically benefit from the daily format because each gradient has its own character - a particular temperature, a hue journey, a level of subtlety. The variety comes from the effectively infinite space of possible gradients, not from artificial difficulty scaling.

Who made it?

Gradientle is made by Odd Behavior Studios - a small independent studio that builds games we want to play ourselves. We're fans of daily games: the shared experience, the ritual, the low time commitment.

Gradientle started as a simple question: what's the most minimal daily puzzle that exercises genuine visual perception? No words, no trivia, no patterns to memorize - just color sense. The OKLAB gradient mechanic turned out to answer that question well enough to build a game around.

If you're enjoying it, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who'd appreciate it - a friend who obsesses over color, an artist, a designer, or anyone who finds themselves spending too long deciding between two nearly identical paint swatches.

Want to get better at it?

Check out the strategy guide - it covers how to read gradients, warm vs. cool sorting, edge-first tactics, and how to use hints efficiently.