Mirror Puzzle

Mirror Puzzle answers a question nobody else in a 1-kilobyte coding competition seems to have asked: what if the classic 8-puzzle used your own face, live, instead of a stock photo of a kitten? The entire thing — camera capture, a 3x3 tile grid, shuffle logic, click-to-slide movement, and (per the source) a win-detection message — fits in under 1024 bytes of HTML, and js1024.fun's own archived 2022 results confirm it as that year's HTML-category winner with a perfect 100/100 score.

A review that had to build its own test rig

This is worth explaining plainly, because it's the most important thing this review learned. Every other game tested this cycle could be checked with this shelf's standard phone-and-desktop testing setup. Mirror Puzzle can't, because it needs a real camera, and the standard setup — like most automated testing environments — doesn't have one. The very first test attempt confirmed this exactly as expected: the game threw a "Requested device not found" error and sat on "Loading camera..." indefinitely, never reaching a testable state.

Rather than leave that as an inconclusive shrug, this review built a small standalone test script using Chromium's fake-camera flags (a standard technique for testing camera-dependent web apps), which makes the browser present a synthetic looping video pattern as if a webcam were attached. With that in place, the game came alive immediately, and its controls could be tested properly — not by eye, but by comparing the actual DOM state of the puzzle tiles before and after each input. A real touchscreen tap on the shuffle button rearranged the tiles, confirmed at the DOM level. A real touchscreen tap on a tile positioned next to the empty grid space correctly slid it into place, also confirmed at the DOM level, and the same held true for a real mouse click on the desktop profile. Both control schemes work exactly as the classic 8-puzzle format requires.

That success comes with an important caveat for anyone hosting this rather than just reviewing it: the reason testing needed a workaround is that camera access has to be explicitly granted to a page (or, if embedded, to the specific iframe showing it) before getUserMedia will return anything at all. A page or embed that doesn't grant that access will show real visitors exactly the same "Loading camera..." freeze this review's first, unmodified attempt hit — not a bug in the game, but a real deployment requirement it can't function without.

A clever trick, honestly limited in scope

Reading the developer's own README turns up two specific, candidly documented issues: rotating the device mid-puzzle can leave grey bars in the captured video that only a full refresh clears (and that refresh also resets the board), and the video feed isn't centred in its frame, which can mean tilting a phone or leaning toward a webcam slightly to get your face fully in shot. Both are believable trade-offs for something built under a 1-kilobyte size ceiling, and neither prevented the puzzle from working correctly once a camera feed was present.

What's harder to get past is how little there is here once the initial "oh, that's clever" reaction passes. There's one puzzle type, no levels, no difficulty progression, and nothing to come back for beyond shuffling your own face again. That's a completely reasonable scope for a 1024-byte competition entry judged on technical achievement, but it means this plays more like a neat demo than something with staying power as a game.

Final verdict

Mirror Puzzle is a genuine technical achievement — a complete, working, camera-driven puzzle in under a kilobyte, with a perfect competition score to back that up — and its touch and mouse controls check out cleanly once you can actually get a camera feed into it. The score here reflects that real, confirmed functionality balanced against very thin lasting content and a privacy consideration (a live camera feed) that some players will reasonably want to opt out of even for thirty seconds of novelty.