Linelight offers zero-jump minimalist puzzles
Along the line
Linelight [official site] has a rather promising trailer and, combined with yesterday's Steam release, that's rather perked up my Tuesday! It's billed as a minimalist puzzler where you play as a line segment and scoot back and forth along lines to activate or access new bits of line. It's a puzzler on rails and, having peeped at the slick stylings of the trailer, I'm curious to see just how complex those puzzles can get. Hopefully I'll get a bit of time to spare for it this afternoon, but in the meantime here's said trailer:
According to the Steam page:
"There's no jump button. There's no shoot button. The way you move creates a universe of possibilities and one mind-bending experience.
"Guide Dash across the game's rich, clean, and relaxing worlds; Linelight simulates the experience of getting an A+ on an exceptionally hard test while receiving a back massage."
I feel like if someone were to try giving me a back massage while I was completing a difficult test I would probably lamp them one because DO NOT TOUCH ME WHILE I AM CONCENTRATING, but the sentiment is probably more that the game is supposed to be taxing but pleasurable.
If you're interested in projects reducing or refining playspaces for games, particularly in terms of the dimensions they use, you should also keep an eye out for Line Wobbler by Robin Baumgarten. It's a "one-dimensional dungeon crawler" which you play on a 5 metre-long LED strip and control using one of those springs you find in shoe trees or used as doorstops. The idea there is to transport your green light to the far end of the strip with each journey representing a level. You twang the spring to kill enemies which are represented as red blobs on the strip and avoid orang lights which represent lava.
The latter is very much a thing you only encounter at games events like Rezzed so it's nice to see other games along similar-ish lines appearing on PC, even though Linelight probably has more in common with existing logic puzzlers then being an experiment in dimensional restriction exactly, if you see what I mean?
There's a slight launch discount which lasts until Feb 6 but Linelight's usual price will be £6.99/$8.99 I believe.