4D Puzzler Miegakure Continues To Twist My Melon
Almost makes sense now!
I still don't understand Miegakure [official site], and I doubt I will until I get to play the four-dimensional puzzle game myself. We've been talking about it for six years, and each time I think "Yes, yes, I've read Flatland, I should understand this", then I see the game in motion and I'm stumped. Four-dimensional space represented in a three-dimensional view and displayed on a two-dimensional screen? I'm lost. But! Miegakure creator Marc ten Bosch explains the technology behind it in a new video and... I think I'm starting to get this? I would like to play it. Look:
So. Miegakure is a puzzle game set within four-dimensional space - that's a whole extra dimension beyond the three we know, a w in another direction from our x, y, and z. Something. Mathematics. Look, I'm more into words than numbers. The point is, Miegakure shows 3D slices of 4D spaces, so paths and solutions hide in places we can't initially see (or understand, evidently). We've known the premise all along, but it's only really starting to make sense to me after seeing that video's explanation of how its crystals are made, then watching them shift across dimensions. I can almost feel it. Not quite yet.
Old Man Rossignol played an earlier version in 2014 and was jolly impressed:
"While I doubt this game will have as much general genre impact as Portal, I had the same sort of response to playing it for the first time: Miegakure's dimension shifting is a brilliant conceptual flourish that, like Fez before it, snags the imagination to drag us down a rabbit hole of problem solving. I can’t wait to see where it goes next."
Sadly, we've still no clear idea of when we'll get our paws on it to all have a play. Miegakure will be on Windows, Mac, and Linux whenever it does arrive.