Tag: puzzles

Obduction screenshot of house
Review

Obduction is not to be missed

Obduction, despite how cosmic the word sounds, does not refer to flying saucers. More terrestrial than extraterrestrial, obduction means when one oceanic tectonic plate heaves up and laps over a continental plate. One world eclipsing another. Imagine the confusion you’d feel if you one day woke up underwater. Myst (1993) began with Atrus (one of the series’ central curators, played by co-creator Rand Miller) falling out of his world. An iconic frame—prime enough for the box art—of a free-fall silhouette descending from a rift into a starry unknown. In a similar setup, Obduction begins with the world falling on to…
News

Old Man’s Journey, a beautifully slow game about nearing the end of life

In a market oversaturated with dark shooters and bright pixels, calm games can seem few and far between. Enter Old Man’s Journey, a beautiful upcoming game by Viennese studio Broken Rules that is exactly what the title describes. The teaser trailer, released last Thursday, features a cute, white-bearded old man—our assumed protagonist—and the gorgeous seaside city he’s wandering through. The tagline describes it as a game about life, loss and hope, “a final chance to seek amends and find your heart, once lost at sea.” The chalky art style and sweet little drawings befit a steadier pace, so there’s no…
News

Inside dares you to escape

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Inside (PC, Xbox One) BY PLAYDEAD Playdead appears to have taken some lessons from Limbo and the many emulators that came after it. Focusing on atmosphere and a mounting sense of dread, Inside is a journey into the grayness of the human condition under surveillance. You are a boy, you are hunted, you are observed, you are sacrificed, again and again. While more mechanically forgiving than its predecessor, Inside is cruel to its players in a way few other games have ever dared to…
News

Don’t just look at these Rube Goldberg machines, play with them

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Perchang (iOS) BY PERCHANG LIMITED The over-engineered contraptions of Perchang do look a lot like Rube Goldberg machines but they differ very slightly. That difference is that they aren’t strictly there for you to look at; you must also operate them. The goal is simple each time: ensure a pre-requisite number of tiny balls enter the hole before the timer finishes. Without your interaction, this won’t happen, and so you have to press your thumbs on the screen to activate fans, or flippers, or tilt a…
News

Scale creator explains how he builds such sizey-wizey puzzles

As anyone who’s spent more than a few hours scratching their head at that damn fox-chicken-grain riddle knows, solving a puzzle can often be a frustrating, demoralizing experience. If the puzzle’s good enough, it can even feel impossible. But despite however stressed the solver feels while trying to put the puzzle together, there is always at least one other person it has frustrated more: its creator. Whereas the solver only has to find a single solution to put an end to their struggle, the creator has to anticipate all possible solutions and narrow them down to just the desired outcomes…
Review

Glitchspace is a part-time shift of fixing bugs

No videogame is perfect. Somewhere lurking in the seams of polygonal landscapes lives the glitch —a graphical hiccup that could lead to characters not loading properly, items malfunctioning, or walls losing their solid form. However, in recent years the glitch has transcended its status as a technical bug to become a populist generative art tool. For example, Assassin’s Creed Unity’s (2014) walking nightmares wouldn’t have existed without errors to prompt them. Someone found an exploit in Dark Souls (2011) that lets you skip most of the game and break speedrun records. And even older videogames have found new life through…
News

Stephen’s Sausage Roll gives you something to chew on

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Stephen’s Sausage Roll (PC, Mac) BY INCREPARE GAMES Sometimes, you look down at an item of food and wish it was twenty times bigger so you could enjoy more of that food. Other times, you play a game and wish it was twenty times harder so you could play it for longer. Luckily, both are the case with Stephen’s Sausage Roll, a puzzle game about a guy named Stephen who’s sole purpose in life is to grill two giant sausage links to perfection. Stephen’s Sausage…