8-Bit Slide

A little sliding puzzle I built to go with the converter. Shuffle the pixel scene and slide the tiles back into place, or load one of your own photos and turn it into an 8-bit puzzle. It all runs in your browser, and like everything else here, your photo never gets uploaded.

How to play

The board starts shuffled, with one tile missing. Click or tap any tile next to the gap and it slides in. Keep going until the picture is back together. On a keyboard you can use the arrow keys instead, which slide whichever tile sits in that direction from the empty space.

Every shuffle is generated by walking the empty square around a solved board, so the puzzle you get is always solvable. No frustrating dead ends.

Use your own photo

Hit Use my photo and pick any image. It gets cropped square, run through the same pixel treatment as the main converter, then chopped into tiles. Photos with a clear, bold subject make the best puzzles, because you need recognisable landmarks to work out where each tile belongs. The same advice from the pixel art guide applies here.

Nothing is uploaded. The image is read straight into the page and stays on your device.

Difficulty and palettes

Start on 3×3 to get a feel for it. 4×4 is a proper challenge, and 5×5 takes real patience. Your best move count is saved per difficulty in your browser, so you've always got a score to beat.

You can also switch palettes mid-game. Game Boy's four greens make it genuinely harder, since there's less colour to navigate by, while PICO-8 and NES give you more to go on. If you want to know what each palette is about, I wrote a comparison of them all.

Tips

• Solve the top row first, then the left column, and work your way down. Fighting the whole board at once is how you go round in circles.
• Once a row is done, try not to disturb it. Move the gap around the outside instead.
• On the bigger grids, the last two tiles of a row often need a little rotation to slot in. That's normal.
• Stuck? Hit New Game. Every shuffle is different.