Torched!

One kitchen torch. One very hungry critic.

You are the new commis at Chez Flambeau, a tiny bistro in Paris. Chef Odile Flambeau calls the orders, you hold the kitchen torch. Sugar goes gold, not black. And somewhere in the room, with a notebook, sits Gaston Cendre, the most feared food critic in Paris.

Our take on TORCH: a kitchen torch. And "torched" is also what a critic does to a restaurant. Tonight he torches your crème brûlée, or you.

How to play

• Hold the mouse button, or your finger, to torch.
• Keep it moving. Sweep until the whole surface turns amber. Linger and it burns.
• Ring the bell or press Space to serve.

Mouse and touch both work. Best with sound. A night takes about three minutes.

On the menu

• Night 1, "La Répétition": five crème brûlées for five guests, each with a wish ("Extra dark! I like it bitter." "Light please! I want to hear it crack!"). One of them is a man with a notebook. Then the spoon goes in, and you hear what you did.
• Night 2, "Le Poisson": a whole side of salmon on a wooden board (the tail and the belly cook faster than the back), more brûlées, and a roast pepper for the sous-chef. Here the rules flip: "Burn it. ALL of it."
• Night 3, "Le Coup de Feu": a lemon meringue tart, torched with the fine nozzle: brown peaks, white valleys. Then the rush: three tickets at once. "Vite, vite, vite!"
• Night 4, "La Guimauve": a chocolate tart under squares of marshmallow. Each square puffs up under the flame and turns gold, and if you linger, it catches fire. "Au feu!"
• Service continu: the kitchen that never closes. Every dish, every regular, faster and less patient as the evening goes on. Lose three tables (walked out or burnt) and Odile locks the door. It opens after Night 4, and on the title once you have finished any night. How many plates can you send out?
• Le Petit Cendrier: after each night, Gaston's review appears as a newspaper clipping, read aloud by Gaston himself, with zero to three stars. Your tips are your score: stars pay, and so do speed, precision and a wish come true.
• Post your bill in the comments. Beside the newspaper hangs the bill, L’Addition: what every table left you. ✂ Copy the bill puts your night on the clipboard (stars, tips, parfaits and Gaston's headline). Paste it below and let's see whose kitchen runs best.
• Les Archives: your five best evenings of every night hang on a cork board behind the title, cut out of the newspaper with Gaston's headline, your stars, your tips and the stamps you earned that night.
• Eight stamps to collect, from Premier Parfait to Pyromane. Your archive and your stamps stay in your browser, nowhere else.

Behind the Pass: how AI made this

Torched! is built by Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5) as chef de cuisine: plan, architecture, assembly and checks. The human does direction, decisions and playtesting. The rest of the work is split like a kitchen brigade, one agent per station:

• Saucier (Opus 5.5): the sugar simulation, the caramel shader, flame and smoke.
• Maître (Sonnet 5.5): the service. Order rail, nights, HUD, mouse and touch.
• Pâtissier (Sonnet 5.5): the paintings. Prompts, generation, cut-outs, WebP.
• Sommelier (Sonnet 5.5): the sound. Effects, music, voices, editing, loudness.
• Gaston (Opus 5.5): the critic.

Gaston plays every milestone build in a real browser: Playwright, real mouse movements, screenshots, frame rate, load time. He never reads the code, because a critic does not go into the kitchen. Then he writes a review in character, with stars and a list of faults. His reviews are stored unedited, and the kitchen works through the list. Seventeen visits so far, from "Gold on the Menu, Ash on the Plate" on the first evening to "The Guimauve Writes Poetry. The Brûlée Still Writes Apologies." before the fourth night went live.

Tuned by bots, not by feel. Every dish is a grid of cells (96 × 96 for the sugar), simulated at a fixed 60 steps per second with a fixed seed, so bots can test it fairly: an attentive player who watches the colour, a statue who holds the flame still, a waver who flails at random. We tuned until the numbers made sense: an even sweep earns three stars on the brûlée, holding still burns a hole in 1.5 seconds, random waving never earns three stars. The salmon got a real thickness, so its thin tail cooks about 1.5 times faster. The tart got height, so its peaks catch up to 2.5 times the heat of the valleys. Those rules are now part of 134 automated tests, plus 19 browser tests that play the game.

Art, voices, sound and music come from ElevenLabs Creative. Every file is logged with agent, model, prompt and post-processing:

• Paintings (Gaston, Odile, cover, marble counter): GPT Image 2.5 Flare
• Voices: Eleven v4 text-to-speech with audio tags
• Sound effects: ElevenLabs SFX v2
• Music: Eleven Music v2.5, instrumental
• Word-for-word checks of the voice lines: Scribe

Agents cannot hear. So sounds and voices come in several takes on a hidden audition page, and a human picks by ear. Gaston's voice took three rounds: a French language code (too little accent), library voices with a French accent, then the accent written into the spelling ("ze", "'as", "weel").

What went wrong, a selection:

• Burnt sugar stayed brown although the simulation said "burnt". PixiJS had multiplied our texture by its alpha channel, and the alpha channel held the sugar thickness. Gaston's screenshots gave it away.
• The first transcription check of the voice lines looked perfect, because it simply returned our own input text, tags and all. Real transcripts came only once the MP3s went back in as files.
• The newspaper at the end of the night reappeared every 3.2 seconds. Neither the tests nor Gaston noticed (he takes his photo after 1.5 s). The human did, by playing.

Credits

• Direction, decisions, playtesting: Erathul
• Code, shaders, tests and text: Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5)
• Images, voices, sound effects, music: ElevenLabs Creative (GPT Image 2.5 Flare, Eleven v4, SFX v2, Eleven Music v2.5, Scribe)
• Built with PixiJS 8, Howler.js, Vite and TypeScript. Tested with Vitest and Playwright.

Made for AI Browser Game Jam 5, theme: TORCH.