By John Walker on June 30th, 2009 at 11:48 pm.
Thanks to the fine folks at Bonus Level – the create-your-own Flash gaming site – we’ve word of another absorbing puzzler to distract you from the mundanity of your life. It’s called Push, the work of one Ian Snyder, and it’s a completely new (until someone tells me I’m wrong and references something from 1984 on the Amstrex CX44) approach to platforming.
It looks like a traditional pixelly platformer, until you realise you can’t reach your target with your jump alone. Click on the blocks making up the levels with your mouse, and you can ‘push’ them out in a circle, radiating from your cursor. It’s sort of hard to explain with words. I recommend you head over and have a play to find out for yourself.
The only niggle I’ve found is the irritation of the site reloading its sidebar, which jiggles everything on the screen – not something you really want when precision jumping. Not too often a problem, but certainly one I could do without.
Being a Bonus Level game, once you’ve gone through all 75 of the official levels, you can then play through the 122 (at the time of posting) user-made levels, and then even make some of your own for others to play. Well worth a look. Cheers to JP for pointing it out to us.
That is quite a fun game. Great concept too, it’s a great twist on normal platforming.
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Concept is pretty nice. Too finicky for my skills, however, I’m ashamed to admit.
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Fun, but the further I get, the finickier the game gets. I’m halfway in, and some levels…
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That’s remarkably delightful!
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Agree with Bret. A fun gimmick, but it gets old quickly. Too finicky and essentially random. Rather than actually coming up with some kind of strategy, you too often end up just pushing blocks around in more or less the right direction, and hoping it’ll work out.
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Ah. It’s just some levels that are finicky. Some are brilliant. And now I see why Braid’s rewind is so perfect. I’d give several quid to get that here. Just missing that last jump…
Some nice world of goo-y tactile fun.
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It’s cute but the jumping is terribly finicky. Spending 5 minutes after I’ve figured out the puzzle trying to execute the solution will lead to player closing the tab…
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“Triple jump” caused rending of hair and gnashing of teeth and cosing of tabs.
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You hate that one?
Try Fire and Ice. Now that is pain.
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Levels consisting of tiny ice platforms are not for the weak. :(
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It should also be noted that your head is sticky, and allows you to grip to roofs and launch up from their sides.
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@pimorte
…and in the game?
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@MacBeth: Your mum says The Game is what she said.
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The game mechanics are amazing! Took a while to figure that you need to use the mouse as well though
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Fun, but difficult. Fun wins nevertheless.
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This is a very interesting little game! I got through some levels with some tactics I suspect the designer didn’t intend (like just pushing the end goal straight to my guy while he stood on the start point lol) One of the levels has a big ice square with walls. I just ran the mouse up and down creating a kind of muscle movement that launched the guy up the passage to the top area. There is a lot of room for just making up your own way which is very fun. I must have played through about 20 levels before I got stuck enough that I gave up lol.
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fucking brilliant. I love it =)
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Whatever math they use to calculate friction makes it terribly grindingly slow in the snow levels, on my terrifically underpowered machine. (eee 900) I’ll try it again on the rip snorting i7 box.
The “achieved goal” art is cute. I predict a new TF2 spray in my immediate future.
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