Faggle.

The spotlight is your window and your life. It's a row of spotlights as wide as the whole word, sitting flush over the tiles at the start. It only ever pulls back — into the wings — and every tile it leaves falls into shade.

Shade is unguessable. A letter only counts if it sits in an unsolved tile still under the spotlight. A letter hiding in the shade is a miss, even if it's in the word.

Two in a row moves the spotlight. Two hits back to back and it widens right, pulling a tile out of shade. Two misses back to back and it shrinks left, throwing one into shade. A single guess, right or wrong, moves nothing — so the miss you can afford is the one you follow with a hit.

Solve everything under the spotlight and it widens for free. That's the way back from a bad run.

But if there's nothing left to lose on the right, two misses throw shade on the left instead. Once everything under the spotlight is solved except the one tile you're actually chasing, shrinking around it wouldn't hide anything — so instead a tile you already solved gets thrown into shade for good. The one you're chasing stays lit either way, but the spotlight never stops shrinking. Standing on a single letter forever is not a way to avoid losing.

You lose when the spotlight burns out entirely. You win when every tile is showing.

Keys grey out once they can tell you nothing new. When the spotlight widens, any key worth another try comes back with a gold dot.