Raise one cab and the other must fall. One lever, two elevators, seven floors of increasingly impatient guests.
About this game
COUNTERWEIGHT is a precision-arcade elevator game set in the Hotel Meridian, a 1920s art-deco grand hotel where both lift cabs hang from opposite ends of the same cable, run over one big brass sheave. Perfect counterweights. You have exactly one lever.
How to play
- Drag up/down anywhere (or ↑/↓ / W/S) to drive the cable. The system has real momentum — feather the lever and let the brake settle you level with a floor.
- A cab that stops level opens its doors by itself. Each cab holds two guests.
- Deliver guests before their patience drains. Fast service earns tips, and a perfectly smooth silk stop multiplies them ×1.5 — but gentle braking costs you time. Pick your greed.
- Five guests storming off ends your night. Deliver 25 to finish the shift, collect your grade, and take on a harder one.
The twist
The cabs are coupled: cab A's floor plus cab B's floor always equals 8. Send one cab to the penthouse and the other slams down to the lobby. Every pickup repositions your other elevator, so the real game is routing — chain jobs so both cabs are always arriving somewhere useful. And don't hit the buffers: the whole hotel rattles, and the guests remember.
How this was made
This run: Claude Fable 5 designed the mechanic and wrote this page; Claude Opus 5 built the entire game as one self-contained HTML file — canvas rendering, fixed-timestep physics, fully synthesized WebAudio, no assets or libraries. Opus caught 14 of its own bugs in self-review (including a silk-stop bonus that measurably rewarded nothing), and two more visual bugs found in headless-browser playtesting were fixed before shipping. Verified live: zero console errors, and the coupling invariant held through every slam.
Screenshots
Changelog
No changes logged yet. When the maker ships something, it lands here.
Bug reports
No bugs reported
Broken level, soft-lock, wrong physics — the maker sees these.
Nothing broken so far. Suspicious, but we will take it.
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