I know some people here enjoyed Hitman GO and some fewer amount enjoyed Lara Croft GO, well the third game in the GO series Deus Ex GO is being pulled from sale in the immediate future and even if one already purchased it it will apparently no longer be playable after January 4th of next year (no idea why, kinda a dick move IMO).
I don’t know if anyone had that game sitting around in their backlog, but if they did it’s probably a good idea to get to it in the next month or so. I actually did have it in mine, so just gotta remember tyo take my own advice.
Syzygy is a game that caught my eyes back in the Random Game Name days not just because of the odd name but because of the even more unusual mechanical hook of being able to change the game world from being square based to hexagonal and then triangular. I’ve linked the store page gif before, but it sums things up very well.
It’s a good hook, catches one’s eye immediately and such. My question always was what kind of game does one build around it, which was enough for it to end up added to my Steam wishlist. Unfortunately it launched with an initial price of $20 which is a lot to ask for an unknown game with few reviews, so there it stayed until about a year ago where the dev made it free to play as in his words:
I don’t know that it ever flourished but it did get it off of my wishlist and onto my backlog, and I finally got around to giving it the shot the dev hoped for.
The answer to my question as to how it plays is that it is ultimately a pathfinding game. Let me add my own stitched together gif showing the tutorial stage in all three of its orientations:
The goal is obviously to guide the frog fellow to the ladder, but in the square and triangular layouts it isn’t actually possible to do so. When every tile is hexagonal though there is a clean straight path right to it. At its core this is basically what the game is, which answers that first question but adds another: how much of a puzzle game can one build around this?
The answer is a lot of one, both in terms of quantity of puzzles and the difficulty of them. I am struggling to come up with a puzzle game very much like this one, which means that only so much preexisting genre knowledge can be used to help one acclimate to what this asks of them. I’d say I probably struggled more early on with some of the easier puzzles than I did with the mid and even parts of the late game, but that’s not entirely accurate. I think its more that this is a tricky game to balance given its uniqueness which means that at least in my personal experience it has random difficulty spikes in individual puzzles that just baffled me for extended periods of time. Fortunately the game has a world map that functions the same way the puzzles do so some (but not all) of these can be skipped, but the one puzzle I never figured out was one of the very first ones I came across. Again it is such a unique game that I wouldn’t be surprised if ten different players would pick ten different sets of trickiest puzzles, and there was only one (and a half) times where I basically could not progress until I figured one out.
I really haven’t touched much upon how it plays as it’s both straightforward and not. Quickly different elements get added into the mix (enemies with different movement behaviors, shells that you can move around but that can also block your path) along with different areas of the map that add different rules into play (one place has the tiles collapse after stepped on by you or an enemy, another is icy and causes you to continue sliding in any given direction) that aren’t revolutionary but do shift up how you have to approach things. The game is rarely easy as you basically have to hold three different stage layouts in your mind at all times, which is necessary as most puzzles require you to switch between various orientations at least a few times to crack them.
To toss in a quick mental example, if a shell acts as a block you have to move onto a switch but you only have X number of moves before an enemy closes in on you the distance and direction you cover in a given move is different in each of the three modes. Of course the three modes also affect the enemy’s path and behavior to a degree as well, perhaps moving the shell in the enemy’s way and then switching the orientation at the last moment to make it harder for the enemy to maneuver around would be a better course while you look for a different way to get that switch taken care of.
The presentation is basic but functional, I think any more detailed artwork would cause all sorts of issues given the central gimmick. One can play with the mouse or a controller but neither feels as great as one would hope, it is both a game one can tell a lot of energy was put into yet is filled with rough edges and implementations one would have hoped would’ve been sorted out before release. I’m not lamenting a lack of AAA polish, but when it is a struggle to highlight the player character on controller when in the square mode and doing so is the only way to switch to a different orientation… that comes up a lot.
There is a mid-game revelation that I would not wish to ruin before someone played the game but I am unsure if anyone will, so:
After solving enough puzzles in a given area the player will make it to a mirror on the overworld map where your reflection is instead that of a horse fellow, if you click on them you enter an alternate overworld filled with different puzzles. This mirror world functions on the same mechanics but the horse move differently: with squares he only moves diagonally, with hexes he moves sorta like a chess knight (basically like a L) and with triangles he can only move to tiles the triangle tips point at. This is… a lot to internalize at this point as now you can cross gaps and such, for me at least it became much trickier to visualize paths through the various layouts. I eventually adjusted to it and I respect how bold of a twist it was, but this was also where I got hard stopped for a bit as a certain early puzzle in the mirror realm required you to deal with a straight line of enemies moving up and down the playing field and it was very easy to screw up early moves in a way that likely made it impossible to solve; naturally this had to be solved to open up access to the next region and there was no puzzles like this from this point forward.
BTW every puzzle has a line of text along the top of the screen and all of the text in the mirror realm is backwards. Most would consider that brilliant, what I considered brilliant was also reversing all of the text in the pause menu. Made it very difficult to parse and if I didn’t recall where the exit and reset puzzle options were it would have been an issue, but how can one hate a game that commits to the bit that hard?
It’d be really great to conclude the story of this overlooked game by declaring that it was a gem all along, but that would be too generous. It has flaws, it can be harsh, it ain’t easy and I can see it coming off as abrasive. That said it isn’t bad, alright feels like a pretty fair rating for it. Often times unusual ideas committed to boldly end up like this, and I think that’s okay. Even with better luck it’d never have been a Baba Is You type of success mechanically or financially, but it probably deserved better than the fate it received. Ultimately I think a number of people who tried it were always gonna go “neat” initially and then bounce off of it, I saw it through to the end and even I don’t love it, but I respect that it very much is what it wanted to be warts and all.
It’s so hard to know what to do with an idea like this. I’ve seen a fair number of people working on games that are undeniably neat but don’t generate a frisson for the player. Working through them feels like work instead of discovery, even though all the elements are in place and the puzzle chain of logic is sound.
Honestly my best advice is to get those games tested more often. I see way more bad harmful playtesting than good but there’s something about watching people get bored and tired that really challenges a designer’s investment in their game.
When they can see that the game is working as intended but just not exciting, sometimes, in lucky circumstances, it challenges the game’s foundation enough that really wild and great ideas get introduced. That’s when I’ve seen games become great.
The original Prince of Persia was a famous example of this, Mechner finally relenting and adding the simple duelling system because the game just wasn’t engaging without that added threat.
It’s also one reason why Infocom adventure games are fairer and have stood the test of time. They were tested constantly by other writers and they respected their testers enough that some became writers themselves.
From what I’ve played of the game and @username’s writeup I think the problem with this specific mechanic in the context of a pure puzzle game is that it’s really damn hard to visualize and keep all the puzzle state in your mind at once. It ends up feeling like work because it inherently requires trial and error. A lot of times you’re robbed of the eureka moment because it’s hard to see the big picture, so you’re just stumbling around until something tactically works out for you.
Some of my favorite moments in Jelly no Puzzle involved having epiphanies in the shower or while walking and not actively playing the game. (I was very pleased to learn a couple playtesters reported doing this in my ghost game, too!) I didn’t get nearly as far as username did, but it’s hard for me to imagine that experience being common in Syzygy.
If this was a mechanic in another style of game – perhaps one that only required it be used for short-term advantages – it might feel pretty good.
I remember that was what I thought when username first posted it a couple years back and we had a brief discussion about the hardcore they did to redraw pixel art and whether this was interesting. Unfortunate.
Zengage is like if Nintendo published an itch.io game.
I was always told to start with an eye-catching line even if not 100% accurate, but this is fairly close (might more readily map to a low level Steam release). Zengage, otherwise known as Somnium in Japan, also otherwise known as Nemrem in Europe, is a tile slider that is a part of the DS Art Style series of games. Seemingly at some point when it transitioned from bit Generations to Art Style the actual stylish requirement got dropped as this is the most basic looking game, featuring plain backgrounds, a few colors of squares and circles, and success rewarded with bits of clip art.
The goal is to get all the color circles on top of the same color tiles but unlike most games like this you don’t actually move the circles but instead slide an entire row or column worth of square tiles at a time. Of course the game quickly introduces arrow tiles that move a circle and the focus often shifts to moving them around anyways, but I digress.
The game is split up to a bunch of sets of nine with each introducing a new mechanical twist from the basic (the aforementioned arrows, including single use ones) to the more out there (counting down bombs that can blow up circles or various other objects, switches that can rotate every arrow 90 degrees while a circle is on it, or lines that make it so that the rows/columns on either side of them can be moved independently of the other). Once you pass five of them you get a bit of clip art and then unlock the next set, plus eventually some post-game ones.
The game isn’t bad but it is very dry, by my later time with the game it felt like I was going through the motions grinding away than being actively engaged. This isn’t to say it is easy, it’s actually very hard if you want to go through everything. The late puzzles are rough, and to unlock the final set you need to clear all of them in under their “par” number of moves. That is in a word absurd, I tried it (by try I mean I tried using a walkthrough to up my scores) because I figure the amount of people who have even seen them is relatively minuscule but it was beyond me.
So if it is kinda mediocre why bother mentioning it? Because there is a chance this is the lowest selling Nintendo published game in existence (it has to be in contention) and that makes it a curiosity to me. It clearly was made on a shoestring budget (most of the effort was probably spent on the music, and some of the music is awful noise) and I’m always interested in these odd little games that sneak out to little acclaim. Turns out being Nintendo published doesn’t make it inherently any more interesting than other random low budget sliding puzzle games hiding on say the Steam store.
Just want to quickly touch on this game for a specific reason I’ll get to in a bit. Basically you are part of a subterranean human society/cult who followed a doomsday kook who happened to seemingly be right about said nuclear doomsday, where when children hit a certain age they must undergo a series of trials to show they are ready for the struggles that this life requires or something along those lines. Granted they do so by solving puzzles that can’t possibly have any real world application but best not to overthink things.
(Here is where I realize that I exclusively took screenshots of the between-puzzle bits, let’s take a quick trip to the Steam page…)
The puzzles basically consist of you rotating or moving a light source in order to shine light on a emblem generally opposite it on the circular playing field. What happens is you move it initially until it shines on a switch or some other aspect of the stage that is generally blocking the light, once you do so you are free to use it to maneuver a different part of the stage (even when no longer shined on) that let’s the light shine on a different switch, and eventually you maneuver everything so that the light makes it to its goal. Very often the stages are made up of various rotating circles that you must prod until you find all the switches for so that it is fully active, one also deals with crystals that magnify any light that touch it and so forth. It can be a bit finicky at times, but it generally works well enough for the game’s 35 puzzles.
The reason I bothered to write up the game though is A) a mild spoiler, and B) ties into the framing narrative. After solving so many puzzles you advance to a different area of the trial, and like so many video game environments they are littered with dropped notes that tie into various bits of background and narrative. Very early on the game drops hints of things perhaps being hidden from those in this community and wouldn’t you know it, perhaps there is a way in these trials to figure out what that is. It hints at this next part a bit but in every puzzle there is a second hidden red goal emblem you can light up, and finding all of them will perhaps unveil these secrets (I mean, they will, it’s a game after all). The thing that is clever though is that many of them can only be found after completing the puzzle the correct way first as once the goal emblem is lit up it stays so, so now you have a second light source to work with. Many of them are also off screen and require sussing out via looking for certain clues or tells.
I appreciate a good “single puzzles hide additional hidden ones within them” trick, and while this game isn’t the best I’ve seen it done (hi Toki Tori 2) it’s still pretty committed to the bit. At its best the game is still only “good” but it is fairly breezy to work through, has a central gimmick that while not 100% unique isn’t overdone, and has this particular design quirk that always appeals to me. That’s pretty much all I ask out of a $3 game.
Away from my actual PC and hence my screenshots and notes, so will likely keep this short. That said I feel the need to actually mention this game as it is a pretty good little puzzle game.
In Magnibox you control a box-shaped magnet who can move by either rotating left or right via rotating 90 degrees or by flying towards a positive + tile or away from a negative - tile at the press of a button when oriented towards them with nothing between you and them. Game is split up into eight worlds of 20 stages each, with each world containing one or two added objects or mechanics to mix things up such as keys to collect to unlock a door, items that switch your magnets polarity and boxes that switch places with you when you shoot your magnetism at them.
Unlike many of the puzzle games I write about Magnibox is very breezy. There is a fairly smooth difficulty curve and by the end it isn’t a pushover, but it starts off fairly gentle and even the more complicated puzzles aren’t too involved in terms of how many steps it takes to solve them. I got stuck for a bit on a couple of occasions but generally speaking I was always making regular progress. The game lets you unlock every single stage from the settings (helpful in cases such as one’s PC dying midway through playing the game), it really doesn’t want to trip you up too harshly.
Often times these more generous puzzles games feel a bit boring as being puzzled is the point, but this game threads that particular needle very well. Rarely too difficult while rarely feeling rote, it’s probably one of the stronger “fine for beginners” puzzle games I’ve played recently that also has enough for more experienced puzzle game players.
So last week I played through the demo for Block Machines and…
…Okay here is the deal with this one. Back in 2016 this dev released his first game Patterna, which was also the first unknown game I stumbled upon thanks to checking the Steam new release list every day that was actually rather good. I apparently put 40 hours into it according to Steam, gave it 4 stars on my backloggery page, really dug it in general. In many ways it is the game that put the notion that there are probably all sort of neat or interesting games slipping through the cracks on Steam all the time, or at least odd ones, so it’d probably be worth digging into that. In other words I may very well have never ended up writing about Random Game Names for years on here if not for Patterna, so I am a bit sentimental about it. Now all these years later the dev finally gets around to releasing a new game and two weeks after release it is sitting at two reviews and… I can’t just not spread the word about it as little as I can, I owe him at least that much.
Where Patterna was a rather difficult Hexcells-esque number/logic puzzler, a subgenre I am pretty good at, Block Machine is a rather difficult programming game, a genre I am iffy at best at. Hence why I decided to try the demo first, if it is that difficult then I needed to see if it is even within my abilities to handle it.
On the store page the game is described as such:
I have no idea what parts of that mean (second time I’ve come across a reference to Von Neumann this week) but the “blocks are code and data” bit basically means that both the blocks you use to build the solution to the puzzle, and the blocks you process to solve said puzzles, are the same. This means they are both on the same playing field at the same time, are subject to the same rules, and can physically “bump” into one another. In many cases the same signal that acts as the charge that sets your design into motion will also have to pass through these “input” blocks and in fact they will often have a direct role to play in whatever it is you design.
To simplify the basic design ethos as best I can you have an initial big arrow that shoots a signal into the system that serves as the charge that puts things into motion and follows the path various smaller arrows you place lays out, making its way through the entire system instantaneously unless you manually place single turn/cycle “pauses” on any of said smaller arrows (if you mark three of these arrows in this way you can delay the signal three cycles). There are blocks with multiple arrows that split said signal, blocks which move or delete other blocks, and blocks that place blocks from an input list onto the playing field or export them off of it onto specific output lists. Once this is all tutorialized you are given a few seemingly easy tasks to perform to wrap up the demo. The last two included are calculating how many thirds are left over when you divide the number of blocks in the input list by three, and removing any duplications from a sequence of arrows (ex. if UDDUUUDD is inputted in only export UDUD in that order). Oh yeah, and any solution has to work for multiple instances so you can’t cheat by customizing it to just the initial lists given.
It is when you set upon these tasks that a couple of things quickly become evident. One is that each signal block only shoots out a signal a single time at the start of the very first cycle, so as most processes have to repeat you likely have to design it as a loop, in particular having to manually make sure all the elements of it are timed correctly. Two, and more importantly, there is not a simple way to set up an “if/then” process. In the other programming games I have played there is generally a provide way to detect something so that one can craft a “if X then do Y, if not then do Z” process with relative ease (such as "if positive follow this path, if negative follow this other one) but at least in the demo you are given no blocks that on their own have any detection abilities.
This basically forces the player to hardcore their own systems for doing this, and I did so in part by taking advantage of the mechanic I’ve yet to mention: you can weld various blocks together to create smaller self-contained machines designed to handle specific processes and that can be moved around the field as needed (everything works on ice level rules: things keep moving until they bump into something). To solve that remove duplications problem I basically ended up building a mirrored solution where each side had a mini-output machine the detected when the inputted arrow block was pointing in its direction (by running the signal through said arrow), moving over a spot to output it, then moving out of the way to be replaced by a mini-deleting machine to remove any arrow blocks that followed. The thing is this also required a way for one side of this mirrored solution to message the other to let it know when it outputted something so that it could get the machines back into their original orientations. All this required getting the timing on everything correct, making sure that the mini-machines never blocked an arrows sending a signal elsewhere no matter where they were currently located, and that the various moving parts never bumped into each other. Here’s a screenshot I took of it, fun fact I have never designed an efficient anything in my life.
(FWIW you can color code things for easier readability, if I thought far enough ahead to “hey, I may post this someday” I’d have done so, my bads)
Ultimately I decided I could keep up with it enough so I picked up the full game, although I’m not sure when I’ll actually get around to it or if I’ll be able to see it through to the end. Still even only having gotten through the demo portion it is clearly a well thought out concept with a couple little things that work to give it its own flavor as a programming game. I know many of you aren’t into programming games and this definitely isn’t a good choice for one’s first one, but if you do have some experience with them I suggest… and perhaps even ask considering giving the demo a shot. Guy doesn’t know me but I owe him a good bit, plus I’d like to get a third game from him before the end of the decade
this reminds me of earlier zachtronics games where it was up to the player to map real-world computing/circuit concepts to the primitive tools the game gave you rather than having an explicit component for branching or logical operators. i always enjoyed this style more, because you get to invent/discover the building blocks more organically, and then use them to solve harder problems. being able to interact with different layers of abstraction without the interface having to change is nice. lots of little tactical choices to make in addition to the large engineering problem you’re solving.
also since instructions and data are both “blocks” here, it has the potential for some very interesting self-modifying machines.
I tried this earlier today and it is very neat. I think how it handles the overworld map by making the puzzles much more about “how do I get that stone from here to there” rather than the actual single screen sokoban puzzles is pretty clever. It reminds me a bit of another old puzzlescript game I probably mentioned in this topic ages ago named Overrwyrld, although Courtyard while less “clever” conceptually probably has stronger actual puzzle design.
It strikes me that I really should post in this topic more seeing as I both started it and still play a solid number of puzzle games. I think I just always feel like I gotta give things a full write-up and that is discouraging.
Anyways I played Manifold Garden over the past few days after years of being curious about it and it was fine. There’s probably a lot one could write about it, someone other than me, but my one personal takeaway is that it ultimately did feel a lot like two related but different puzzle games sort of stapled together. You have the showpiece recursive areas which are neat and have the cool falling through repeated eternity until you land on something bits, but there is a lot of being in closed rooms and manipulating gravity in one of six directions (both ways along the X, Y and Z axes) to get blocks on switches which is also fine but not quite the same. I’d still recommend it for the curious as the presentation is tremendous, but I do kinda feel like they realized at some point that they only had so many ideas for the recursive bits and didn’t want to get killed for releasing an “only” 90-120 minutes long game.
Oh yeah, the one downside to the more open recursive areas is that if you end up off course in looking for a solution you can end up very much so, much more so than is generally possible in puzzle games.
As a heads-up the two puzzle games made by Waldemar Umaniz both went free to own on Steam this week. The first of which, Dawn of a Soul, made my top ten list out of the few hundred games I played from first giant itch charity, very strong recommendation for anyone who may be a fan of that flavor of puzzle game. Move ‘n’ Bloom I picked up a couple years ago but didn’t get around to playing more than the demo for but it seemed like a clever sorta-sokoban where you gotta get all the like colored blocks touching each other so they can all bloom into flowers. I dug the demo.
I don’t remember when I purchased Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows. Probably I saw one of my Steam friends get it during a sale and it looked cheap enough to take a chance on. But I got around to trying it a few days ago.
It’s simple in many ways (not a bad thing) but the puzzles don’t take long before they start to get challenging. In fact, I pretty much hit my limit when they introduced the tunnels (in both the first area and the second). And I’m sure the levels that stumped me are nothing compared to what comes later.
