Demondrian: Colour Puzzler Gets Playable Demo [ndrian]

Do we have a category for "things which probably count as news but also double as a way of making other people aware of personal achievements"? No? Then this is NEWS. Welcome to the NEWSDOME. There's a demo build of Demondrian - a puzzle game about gathering squares into a single ball of colour by using the power of in-game gravity. A demo build which I have finally BESTED*.

If you missed my earlier post, Demondrian [TIG forum thread] is a puzzle game with a colour palette inspired by the work of artist Piet Mondrian. What you do is you click on squares to make them disappear then a new one drops in from above. If you group four of them into a 2x2 square then they morph into a bigger block. Bigger blocks sound like BETTER blocks, you might say. They sort of are, but they can also block some of your options when trying to get rid of the smaller ones as a bigger one can't drop down into a small space. You can also get stuck because blocks of the same colour and size can't be zapped if they're next to one another.

You can thus end up in situations where you can theoretically keep making moves but they just rearrange the blocks - getting any further in the puzzle is impossible. I'd say the game needs a way to detect that because otherwise it keeps insisting moves are possible and it's up to you to reset. That said, Demondrian is definitely still a work in progress and developer Sebastian Uribe (Perro Electrico) mentions potentially adding things like an undo button and bars which prevent blocks falling or ways to prevent movement in some directions. It looks like the idea is more about providing a difficulty curve and a certain sense of progression.

But yes, for now you can fiddle with the browser-based demo and get a feel for the game. And win:

And by "win" I mean "force Demondrian to cosplay as Kasimir Malevich's Black Square".

*It felt like a true achievement until I remembered that while the game has been running in my browser all day I sort of did a morning of work and then had lunch and was only actually playing it on my coffee break so perhaps there is less to crow about than I thought. POINT IS, I feel good.