Phial press kit
Everything needed to write about Phial: the fact sheet, screenshots at device resolution, the app icon, and half a minute of unedited gameplay. All of it free to reproduce, no permission needed.
- iPhone only
- Target October 2026
- Free download, $1.99 unlock
Playing it before release
Phial is finished, and review access to the whole game - all 105 levels, all 5 rooms and the Daily Order, not a slice of it - goes out on request. Write to support@markolana.com saying where you write, and a build comes back by email.
Reviewing the paid unlock costs nothing. In a pre-release build Apple puts purchases in test mode, so tapping Unlock charges nothing and there is no code to redeem. There is no special reviewer build to wait for - the ordinary one already behaves this way.
- App Store: the listing goes public on release, targeted for October 2026. The page does not exist before then, so there is deliberately no link here yet.
- Product page: https://markolana.com/phial/
- Review access, interviews, anything missing: support@markolana.com
The details, checked against the game
| Title | Phial |
|---|---|
| App Store listing | Phial - Alchemy Sort Puzzle |
| Developer | Andriy Nastyn (Markolana), Ukraine |
| Platform | iPhone only, iOS 18.0 or later |
| Genre | Puzzle, casual |
| Release | Target October 2026 |
| Price | Free to download. Chapter 1 (17 levels) is free; one non-consumable in-app purchase of $1.99 unlocks the rest, permanently. |
| Content | 105 levels, 5 chapters, 5 Master’s Trials, 315 stars. |
| Languages | English |
| Sync | Progress syncs over iCloud |
| Monetization | No ads, no timers, no lives, no consumables, no tracking |
Features
Phial starts from the pouring gesture of a sort puzzle and then becomes a different game: the colours react, so the vial you need is one you make rather than one you find.
- A reaction system, not a sorting toy
- Three primary colours mix into three secondaries, so the vial you need can be made rather than found.
- Sparks are the budget
- Every mix costs a spark and most boards give you barely enough, which is what turns a sort into a plan.
- Five rooms, one new rule each
- Cloudy glass, wax seals, Silver and mixed vial sizes, then the Still - one new rule per room, and each one changes what a board can hide from you.
- Free hints from the solver that proved the level
- The same solver that proves every level is solvable also runs on your phone. Given room to finish it returns the provably best next move; on the densest boards it falls back to a strong one rather than stalling. Either way it is free and unmetered.
- The Daily Order
- One puzzle a day, the same board for every player at the same stage, read from a bundled 730-day almanac. Instant, offline, and no server exists to go down.
- Four kinds of order, not one
- Sort the shelf; brew a colour the order names; fill a row of commissioned vials; or clean a colour off the shelf entirely - remove every drop of Blue, then sort what is left. The goal row tells you which, and each one asks for different reasoning.
- Vials are not all the same size
- Capacity runs from two drops to six across the campaign, and a board mixes sizes on one shelf. A short vial is a constraint and a long one is workspace, so the shape of the shelf is part of the puzzle rather than decoration.
- Five Master's Trials
- One bonus puzzle per room, unlocked with stars rather than progress.
- Progress syncs over iCloud
- Stars, discoveries, current level and the daily streak move to a new phone through the player’s own iCloud account. There is no account to make and no server.
Playable, not merely compliant
A puzzle game about colour has an obvious problem, so 7 symbols - one per colour - are drawn on every drop of liquid, with no way to switch them off.
- VoiceOver on the board itself
- Every vial reads its contents bottom-up, by drop count and colour - "3 drops of Red, then 2 drops of Blue" - and a cloudy layer reads as hidden rather than leaking the colour it covers.
- Seven symbols, always on
- One shape per colour, drawn on every drop of liquid, with no setting to switch them off. Colour is never the only thing telling you what is in a vial.
- Dynamic Type as a layout mode
- At the largest accessibility sizes the screens rearrange rather than shrink or truncate, so nothing is cut off and nothing needs pinching.
- Reduce Motion, twice
- Honoured from the iOS setting, and available separately inside the game for players who want the system default left alone.
- No timers and no failure state
- Nothing requires speed, and nothing punishes a wrong move beyond an undo. Undo is unlimited and Reset returns the same board.
What Phial is not
Each of these was cut from our own marketing copy for being false. They are written down here so that nothing gets repeated by mistake.
- No Liquid Glass, and not an iOS 26 app
- Phial runs on iOS 18 and later, and it does not use Apple’s Liquid Glass look.
- No iPad version
- Phial is an iPhone game, portrait only. There is no iPad build today - one is planned as a separate release, with no date, so please do not print either that it runs on iPad or that it never will.
- No localization beyond English
- The game is in English only, everywhere.
- No widgets, Live Activities, Shortcuts, Game Center or Spotlight
- Phial is the app and nothing else - no leaderboards, no achievements, and nothing on the Lock Screen or in search.
- No ads, no analytics, no tracking
- There is no advertising and no third-party code in the app at all.
Every room, and what it adds
9 captures at 1320 × 2868, straight off an iPhone - Apple’s 6.9 inch App Store size. No device frames, no filters, no retouching: this is what the game renders.
Download
Every screenshot below is the full capture at 1320 × 2868, PNG, no alpha channel. Nothing is cropped, framed or retouched; they are compressed to an 8-bit palette to keep the bundle downloadable. Ask if you need the uncompressed files.
| File | What it shows |
|---|---|
| phial-board-l004-first-spark.png | First Spark |
| phial-board-l026-cloudy-glass.png | Cloudy glass |
| phial-board-l048-wax.png | One spark to spend |
| phial-board-l071-silver.png | Silver |
| phial-board-l097-still.png | The Still |
| phial-board-daily-order.png | The Daily Order |
| phial-menu-chapters.png | Five rooms |
| phial-journal-entry.png | The journal |
| phial-win-modal.png | Three stars |
Twelve seconds of the game running
Captured off an iPhone with nothing cut and no trailer editing. The liquid, the glass and the light are drawn and lit as you watch, so a full vial has depth down its whole column and catches the lamp on the wall of the glass.
A pour resolves one drop at a time, and when a reaction sets off another reaction the chain plays out beat by beat instead of snapping to the answer.
The icon
The app icon as shipped, at four sizes. PNG, square, no alpha channel.
- phial-icon-1024.png (1024 × 1024)
- phial-icon-512.png (512 × 512)
- phial-icon-256.png (256 × 256)
- phial-icon-120.png (120 × 120)
The whole kit as one file
The 9 screenshots, the app icon and the gameplay video, zipped.
About Markolana
Phial is made by Andriy Nastyn, a solo developer working as Markolana in Ukraine. It is Markolana’s first App Store release. One person designed the game, tuned every level and did the QA; AI wrote the code and painted the art to that design.
Every board in the game was solved by machine before it shipped, and the move count shown as par is that solution’s proven best. A puzzle that could not be proved does not go in - which is why there is no such thing as an impossible level in Phial, and why a hint can afford to be free.
Ask for anything missing
Press and creator enquiries, review codes, interviews, or a capture of something specific: write to support@markolana.com. Replies come from a person, usually the one who made the game.
Assets on this page may be reproduced in coverage of Phial, in whole or in part, without asking first.