On a phone the front page opens as a stage select: the place fills the screen and turns to the next one every three seconds. It was built to hand itself over the moment a finger arrived and then stop for good, on the reasoning that a carousel still moving under a thumb is fighting the person using it.
The reasoning is sound and the result was wrong. On a phone almost every touch is a scroll, and a scroll that merely passes over the hero is not a request to stop it. The page froze on whatever place happened to be up, with nothing short of a reload to start it again.
So it does not stop any more. Being off screen or in a hidden tab still holds it, because turning through pictures nobody is looking at is only work. An arrow or a swipe moves it and restarts the three seconds on the place it lands on, so the lit bar under the stage count refills instead of sitting full. A tap that is not a swipe now does nothing at all, where it used to be the gesture that killed it.
One exception stayed. If the operating system asks for reduced motion the hero holds still, because the accessibility page promises that setting is honoured. It reads the system preference and deliberately not the reduced-motion switch inside the game, which is on by default since it doubles as the lighter-graphics mode, and would have left the front page frozen for nearly everybody.
The rest of the week went on the pictures. Each place on the phone hero is a frame rendered out of the capture itself rather than a photograph taken beside it, so choosing one is choosing where to stand and which way to look. That is done by eye, off a contact sheet of every thirty degrees from each of the two calibrated standing spots. Scoring it automatically does not work: anything that rewards detail picks the nearest bush, and close foliage is the worst thing this kind of capture draws.
Four were wrong. Olsztyn stood inside a pavement cafe, so all twelve headings from it were umbrellas and table clutter. Aachen looked flat at a brick terrace with half the upright frame left over as empty cobbles, while the cathedral stood at the capture's other spot the whole time. Lourmarin had floaters over the roofline and a smeared apron of ground at the camera's feet, and tilting down only traded one of those for the other.
What actually fixed them was not the angle but the lens. An upright phone frame is very tall, so a wide view always buys sky at the top and near ground at the bottom, and near ground is where a capture is thinnest: it smears. A longer lens crops both ends off and what is left reads as a photograph. Lourmarin took a further five degrees of turn purely to move one pink floater out of the corner where the headline sits.
Gstaad is the honest failure. It is an underground car park with 2.9 metres of headroom, so the ceiling is in every upright frame and it is the least sampled surface in the place. A narrow lens down the long aisle turns it from a formless grey into a receding plane with beams in it, which is better and is not good. The version of it we load is thin, and no heading in it is a photograph. Either it comes out of the rotation or a denser one gets built; framing is not the answer.