You get one screenshot from an anime series or film. Name the anime. You have five guesses, picked from a searchable list, so spelling never costs you a try, and a skip costs the same as a wrong guess.
Get it right and the anime is named with a short synopsis. A new puzzle goes up every day at 00:00 UTC, and it is the same one for every player that day.
Studios leave fingerprints. Kyoto Animation's lighting is soft and glossy, with a lot of care in the hair highlights. Trigger draws hard angles and flat, saturated colour. Shaft tilts heads and cuts to text cards. Ghibli's backgrounds look hand-painted because they are, and Madhouse's older work has a heavier line and grainier film.
If you can name the studio from frame one, the studio hint becomes a confirmation instead of a clue, and you have effectively bought yourself an extra guess.
A 4:3 frame with visible film grain is almost always pre-2006. Clean digital gradients, bloom lighting and thin outlines point to after 2012. Compositing tricks date things too: heavy digital lens flare belongs to the late 2000s, while modern shows lean on depth-of-field blur.
That narrows the year before the year hint arrives.
A skip costs the same as a wrong guess but does not use up a title you might want later. If frame one is a sky, a close-up of a hand or an empty classroom, skip it and take the next frame plus the studio rather than burning a real guess on a hunch.
Every past puzzle stays playable, so you can work back through all of them at your own pace, and past answers are listed once a puzzle is over.