Spatial Reasoning

Another game from the 14th Ludum Dare competition, Mindwall is a simple, original puzzle game with, given its short development time, remarkable polish.

Loops of Zen is a stark, abstract puzzle game in which you manipulate loops, curves, and lines to form an unbroken whole. Beginning from a diagram like the one in the screenshot, of broken segments and line nubs that lead no where, you click on individual items and rotate them until you achieve a solution.

The simple forms and black-and-white graphics are severe in their simplicity, but the puzzles themselves are engaging. The simplicity of the system lends itself to what ultimately, as the puzzles become more complicated, becomes a set of difficult challenges.

Simple things are actually much harder to create than complicated ones (viz., the iPod); on that account, this is an impressive piece of design.

(Thanks to Infovore.)

A polished elaboration of Narbaculur Drop, which was a 2006 IGF Student Showcase winner, as well as a finalist for the Slamdance Guerrilla Game Festival in the same year, Portal is a level-based puzzle game with the tropes of a conventional first-person shooter. The game is published by Valve as part of its "Orange Box," which also includes additional Half Life 2 material.

Have you ever taken psychedelics? Have you wanted to, but feared the legal complications?

I have the solution for you. Read up on the Hawaiian Baby Woodrose plant. You can order seeds of this legal plant cheaply, and plant them. They are not intended for human consumption. Recommended dose is 4-6 seeds.

Then play Mondrian.

Gimme Friction Baby is a game written for JayIsGames' Casual Game Design Competition #3, whose theme was Replay.

It's a pure, minimalist piece. There's some austere music; there are a few highly geometric elements, in black and white and pale blue. Even the lettering is a blockish sans-serif.

The gameplay is similarly free of complication. The player fires balls up into the space overhead, where they gradually slow (presumably thanks to stiff air resistance) and then expand to fill as much space as possible until the circumference somewhere touches a wall or another ball. The player doesn't even get to aim the turret, just choose when in the course of its slow arc he wants to fire.

"Daddy, can we play Chocolate Castle?"

That's Simona. She just turned 4. Vicky, her teenage sister, won't play Okami or Guitar Hero for her right now, and Mommy's too busy to go to Nick JR or Hasbro.com or the Sesame Street site, and she's bored with the videos, media-saturated child that she is. So she's down to Daddy's geeky games, and I can't get away with playing World War II games any more ("Look, It's Meekun!", Mao Chan's tank friend. No, doll, it's a Panzer V.)

She likes Eets, too, but today it's time for Chocolate Castle. She likes it for very different reasons from me, of course; the characters are little bunnies, and they get to eat chocolate. Yum. Of four different types: dark, milk, white, and rose. (Rose? Only place I've seen it is at a very gay chocolate store in the Haight, and the developer is in New Zealand, so where did they encounter it? but never mind.)