Puzzle

Decepticolor is a remarkably polished little game, for a 48-hour game jam effort. It's a puzzle game, supposedly for two players (one using WASD and the other the arrow keys), but in fact it can readily be played by a single player manipulating both, although it's sometimes hard to remember which of the squares under your control is controlled by which set of keys this way.

Each player controls a square that contains a simple pattern of 16-bit colors. Somewhere in the game are are two "target" squares. You must move your squares to the target squares in such a way that when they overlie the target squares, the pattern of colors matches.

The keys "flip" your squares -- left or right moves you one square distance and flips the pattern across the vertical axis, while up or down flips across the horizontal axis. In addition, if on player flips his square, or part of his square, atop the other player's square, the underlying square assumes the overlying pattern. Thus, on many of the higher levels, you need to figure out how to strategically flip squares atop part of each other in order to build the target pattern. (In the screenshot above, the target squares are all blue, so the two manueverable squares need to be manipulated to transform each other to an all-blue state.)

The result is quite an interesting set of spatial and logic challenges. Only twelve levels, but then that's pretty good for 48 hours.

Towlr is a puzzle. Towlr is an art movement. Towlr is an aesthetic with its own manifesto. Sort of. Towlr is frustrating. In Towlr, the cake is not a lie.

Towlr has a + sign in the screen. It has no meaning.

Towlr provides no rules, no tutorial, not even a minimalist statement of goals. You must deduce the goal.

Towlr tells you when you have failed, in a most annoying fashion.

Towlr displays only simple, geometric shapes such as you might see in an Atari 2600 game.

Towlr rewards success with cake.

In Towlr, the appropriate response when you succeed is "Doh!".

Towlr looks simple; but actually, there is a highly refined sensibility at work here, one that could only and can only derive from games. It's a sort of minimalism that rejects almost everything we know, or believe we know, about games. There is no hand-holding, no increment in skill, only a puzzle, with no hints and no support. The purpose of Towlr is to figure out how to play, and once you have, you are done.

And just as stark as its gameplay are its visuals and soundscape.

The first Towlr was created by PoV for a Ludum Dare competition, but a bunch have been created since. They are all available at the Towlr site. Some are web-playable, others are downloads, and the downloads vary in what platforms they support. But you should check them out, if only to experience a remarkably different aesthetic of the game.

The analogy is inexact; Harold, after all, lives on a blank page and everything in it he draws, including the environments he traverses. In Max and the Magic Marker, the levels of the world are pre-existing, and Max draws only to traverse them. Yet it seems clear where the game's inspiration comes from.

The mechanic of drawing for traversal is no longer novel, though it is fairly recent; but it's still a mechanic that hasn't been deeply explored, and Max comes up with quite a variety of puzzles in its demo. What perhaps is more novel is the children's book feel to the game; in addition to the debt owed Harold and the Purple Crayon, there's also a nod to Where the Wild Things Are. Max's quest is to capture a monster he drew, and when you stop time (with the spacebar) to draw over moving items, a crown appears on Max's head, much like the one the Wild Things use to crown that book's Max.

Xong is an odd and idiosyncratic munge of a Rogue-like, a level-based puzzle game, and an Arkanoid clone. It's Rogue-like, in that it's an ASCII graphics game with procedurally-generated levels, but the actual gameplay is puzzle solving with Breakout-like aspects.

Mushroom Roulette is a simple puzzle game, and like all good puzzle games, comprises a handful of elements, with levels ringing the changes on what's feasible with those elements.

You control a single character with the arrow keys; scattered about the screen are red mushrooms, which earn you both score and health, and you must eat them all to complete the level. There are also sliding blocks, leading to Sokoban-style puzzles, as well as inert ones; purple mushrooms allow you to destroy a block, while black ones freeze all in place. Pink mushrooms give score but cost health, and there are also butterflies, mobile enemies that will cost both health and score. However, after eating a purple mushroom you can eliminate one instead of a block. Hats protect you from butterflies (once), but if retained increase your score as well.

A 2010 IGF finalist for Excellence in Design, Cogs is a combination of sliding puzzles with mechanical puzzles. You know what sliding puzzles are, even if you don't immediately grok the term: There those stupid little things consisting of plastic squares arranged in a grid with one space left out. You slide the squares around to make a picture. Like a 2-D Rubik's cube, with none of the algorithmic complexity of the cube.

Cogs adds mechanical puzzles; some squares have gears on them. Somewhere on the puzzle is a rotating gear, and you have to slide your gears around to do something -- sometimes simply to get a target gear to rotate, sometimes something more complicated, like arranging gears with hammers on them to strike bells in a particular sequence. Sequencing then becomes a major challenge, because you have to arrange the gears in such a way that the hammers are poised to strike at the right moment, and in the right way. In addition, some puzzle are arranged over the surface of a 3D object, which you can rotate with the right mouse button.

Rocketbirds Revolution is a 2010 IGF Finalist in the Audio and Visual Arts category. It has a totally kickass intro Flash sequence of the protagonist (the "Cock of War") in a jetpack dogfight against three penguins, with appropriately Blue Oyster Cultish-music; the game itself is a fairly conventional platform shooter.

Pulsus is a puzzle game in which one or more spawn points emit small, colored particles in random directions. At one or more locations on the screen are "goals"; a sufficient flux of particles into a goal "completes" it. As the spawn points emit particles, your score declines (and you lose the level if you deplete the score before completing all goals). Conversely, your score is higher if you complete the level quickly.

Created by a group of students at the Danske Akademi for Digital, Interaktiv Underholdning (Danish Academy for Digital, Interactive Entertainment), A Mazing Monk is a too-short puzzler in which you play a Buddhist monk seeking enlightenment, which is apparently found in little glowing stones on the ground.

You stand atop a Rubik's cube, and can rotate it Rubik's-cube style, but only in two of the three possible dimensions, and those two can only be rotated in a single direction. In addition to the glowing squares, some squares contain impassable obstacles, while others contain evil soldiers. If you rotate the cube in such a way that soldiers have an unblocked path to you, they machinegun you to death.

Nine enlightenment stones open a gate to the next level; there are only three, but a "hard mode" link below the game screen offers three more. When you complete the game, you become a Bhoddisatva, radiating enlightenment throughout the small world of the game and causing all the soldiers to become monks themselves.

It's cute, charming, and requires at least a little thought; it is too short, but on the other hand I'm not sure I see how the core gameplay could be extended to a much longer game. Still, it's worth a play.

Malec2b, creator of Dadaists Gone Wild, has some other nifty games tucked away on his site. Today I'll point you to two of his shmups that are similar to Cactus' only by virtue of their uniqueness. Optimization is the common thread between these two small Game Maker games, so puzzle elements play a part in each. They aren't incredibly mind-blowing by any means, but they've got some cool ideas driving them. If you're a fan of either the shooter or puzzle genre you should take for a spin.