She Remembered Caterpillars exits cocoon today
Colourful pathing
She Remembered Caterpillars [official site] is a game I'm currently in the process of reviewing so I'll be able to tell you Wot I Think shortly. In the meantime here's your heads up that the game (formerly known as Perlinoid) is out today and features beautifully illustrated colour gate puzzles.
"She Remembered Caterpillars is a color-matching puzzle game with an unsettling fungipunk aesthetic. Set in a phantasgamorphic world of writhing caterpillars, brightly-colored Gammies, and living architecture, the game will have players eavesdropping on what appears to be one scientist’s quest to save her father."
She Remembered Caterpillars has you figuring out how to guide little sprites around pathways to white pads so that they can float off into the air. The puzzle comes from the fact that there are gating mechanisms which affect whether a sprite of a particular colour is allowed to pass along a pathway. For example, a blue bridge only allows sprites to cross when they contain a bit of blue (so blue, green and purple sprites are allowed while red, orange and yellow are not). A blue gate means the opposite.
As the game goes on the puzzles get a bit more complicated, so there are little stations where you can bleach the colour out of a sprite entirely, or you might need to stand on a pad to extend a walkway between zones, that sort of thing.
If you're thinking this will be a nightmare for any type of colour blindness, I'll add that the different colour gates, bridges and sprites all correspond to different geometric shapes so you should still be able to tell the differences between them. The orientation of a few gates might make that a bit more tricky on some levels than others though.
There's also a narrative which is drip-fed between the levels and the addition of which is part of the reason the game is now She Remembered Caterpillars rather than Perlinoid. I'm still working out to what extent the narrative and the puzzles actually gel with one another. So far the puzzles and the art are the main attraction and I'd say I'm about halfway through given there are apparently 40 levels.
For a taster I do believe there's a demo version currently available over on Itch.io. When the full game is out it'll be there and on Steam.
[Disclosure: Cass Khaw has been involved in She Remembered Caterpillars and is credited as being responsible for the game's narrative. She used to work for us, picking up the Bargain Bucket column and doing news shifts before going on to join the "writing for" rather than "writing about" side of games.]