I love the amount of atmosphere and polish put into this game. The text-based narrator is really clever. The 3d view is really nice in combination with the bright neon 8x8 tiles. The gameplay is pretty good once you get into it. However, you really have to learn how to play by trial and error, even the objective is never stated. This might be intentional, but it’s more frustrating than fun. I got into a lot of confusion over the gameplay, which I will break down below. Despite that I made it to level 23, and overall there’s so much to like about this game.
This might be considered mechanical spoilers for some…
[SPOILER] It took me dozens of tries on the first level to figure out what the tiles do. The X tiles switch on/off when you walk over them. The square blocks disappear beneath you… sometimes? The + tiles turn into squares? And the whole objective is to turn on all blocks? Then later you get [+] tiles which don’t change or disappear… This should really be explained or demonstrated in the lengthy text intro. And wait, sometimes the level changes when you respawn. Are the levels randomly generated????? Indeed, a lot of the levels have paths that are completely unnecessary, and they are not red herrings either. Handmade levels would be very nice, they could be constructed to teach you how to play instead of letting the player figure it out themselves. [/SPOILER]
But once you figure all that out… It’s quite fun! It’s not really about gotchas, more about algorithms and speed. You can look at a level from many angles, plan out a path, and quickly execute it. The challenge is at just the right level once you get past the first 10 levels of throwing yourself into the abyss because you don’t understand the game. The more I play, the more I start thinking that it’s a really neat idea. I have a few suggestions, mostly to improve the early game experience:
- start the first few levels off with mostly “safe” [+] tiles, introduce the other tiles in a safe environment
- remove unnecessary paths from the first few levels, or when you can, use them cleverly as red herrings
- give more hints about what the tiles do, maybe even put in a tutorial
- oh and also… after seeing that terminal interface I really wanted to be able to type some commands…
That’s all I have to say! Fun game!