Kine is one of those titles that annoys me the moment I hear about it, because I deserve to be playing it right now but some team of artists is working really hard on it so they won’t just give it to me. Give it to me, you crazy kids. I have been a good boy all year and I am delighted by what you have made. Please let me have it. Please.
RPS Feature The cherry on top
Chuchel is a tour de force of animation, every scene so vibrant and hilarious, colourful and manic, the slightest tweaks in character facial expressions eliciting guffaws. Every new scene is a glorious delight just to look at, before you even start playing with it. And then, as you click on every element on the screen, delightful, silly and gorgeous things happen. This is a game where I find myself trying to work out what is the correct solution to any given puzzle, just so I can avoid clicking on it before I’ve clicked on everything else. I exhaust every repeated joke until it loops, don’t mind when they do, and call people in from other rooms to see the funniest moments. Chuchel is, beyond belief, wonderful.
RPS Feature Please send help
Puzzlement is a very minimalist puzzle game that packs quite a lot of clever into its little space. You play a very Pac-Man-esque 2D ghost, who wanders around inside/outside a 3D space collecting red blobs. This element of a 2D creature falling around within a 3D environment is completely bemusing, to the point where playing it for a little while is making just typing these letters in a straight line on this screen a confusing experience. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Land of Tiles
This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Gorogoa [official site].
Gorogoa is a game about fitting things together. Fitting a detail in one image with a detail in another and see how it produces something new. And in making it, developer Jason Roberts found that making things fit was one of the greatest challenges he faced, whether those things were puzzles into the game’s tiles, sequences into its story, or details into players’ heads.
Gorogoa is also a game about linking things together. You draw relationships between images and find them leading into and influencing wider themes. And in making it, Roberts found that each decision he made had profound effects on others, the biggest being limiting the game to its two-by-two grid. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Morepix
The best picross/nonogram puzzle game on PC, Pictopix, just got a free update on its first anniversary. It’s added in another 45 large-size puzzles, pretty much doubling the play-time of the whole game. So I’ve gone back in, and argue once more why this is the sort of PC game our industry is sadly failing to celebrate.
RPS Feature Through the square window
Gorogoa feels like a sort of magic that might fall apart in the understanding. It’s a beautiful story in which you solve puzzles more by instinct than deduction, and their solutions feel as magical as the process. Its impossibly overlapping world weaves a delicate fiction that stretches beyond the boundaries of its central conceit. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature GEOMETRIC!
In an attempt to teleport some geometric Islamic art from one location to another, developer Mahdi Bahrami failed to notice a spirograph had flown into the telepod. That’s my theory anyway. The result is a very beautiful, very relaxing puzzle game called Engare.
RPS Feature Difficult Spell
The process from phone to PC is often a troubled one. But how does a long-time mobile favourite fare with its transition to Alphabear: Hardcover Edition [official site]? Here’s wot I think: Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Sackcloth
Hyperbolic responses to you successfully completing a challenge are a perennial issue in puzzle games. When it comes to no-frills mobile puzzling, and for no sensible reason it throws up the word “OUTSTANDING!” at you no matter how tricky the conundrum, it’s pleasantly silly. But when a game tries to add an element of narrative to the situation, where characters fall over themselves to bestow you with accolades on clicking through a mundane brain-teaser with little effort. “Astonishing!” they ejaculate after you turn all three lights green or whatmaybe. “You truly are the chosen one! Have my firstborn!” It starts to feel more than a little disingenuous. It is unfortunate that such nonsense runs through the core of The Automatician [official site]. It doesn’t help that the main puzzle idea itself just isn’t that good. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Mind control
We seem to be in something of a blessed time for puzzle games. Alongside the big names are an ever-growing pile of previously unknown indies creating really inspired ideas, and right near the top of that pile is Semispheres [official site]. A single-player split-screen mind-fuck that’s at once deeply relaxing and brain-rippingly smart. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Clone Something Good
You don’t actually need an original gimmick, developers. You can just take an old gimmick and do it really well. That’s BOOR’s [official site] approach, a 2D platform puzzle game in which your character can create very temporary clones of herself and work in cooperation with them. We’ve seen it lots of times before, but when a good idea is done nicely, it’s – well – a good idea! Make it utterly, utterly lovely to look at and you’re well on your way. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Direct line to my heart
After nearly twenty years in this job, it still doesn’t get any less exciting to find a lovely new game. Linelight [official site] from My Dog Zorro is one such thing, a clean, beautifully presented puzzle game. Here’s wot I think: Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Not really pushing my buttons
I might start a service where I go door to door to puzzle game developers and just calmly reassure them they don’t need an excuse. “It’s fine. No one’s judging you for making a puzzle game! We love them. You don’t need to hide it. You don’t need to disguise it. You don’t need a story.” My gentle, mellifluous tone will steady their nerves, help them relax into their chosen genre, and everyone will benefit. Imprint-X [official site] is a novel little puzzle game from the creators of 2015’s Rymd Resa put beneath some absolute drivel of a story, and after hours of playing I haven’t managed to identify any coherent connection between the two. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Pixel perfect
The PC is oddly bereft of decent Picross/Nonogram puzzles. Could Pictopix [official site] finally be the version that lets us put down our 3DS? Here’s wot I think: Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Ancestry, abjectly
Rusty Lake Hotel [official site] is a game I have meant to write about on RPS for so long. I missed its release, and found it by luck on my phone when searching for interesting escape-the-room games. And wow, did I find interesting. And not only did I discover the incredible Rusty Lake Hotel game, a dark and devastatingly creepy murder mystery adventure, but also their catalogue of remarkably unsettling and often brilliant free Cube Escape games. Each release fits into a larger mythology that feels ominously huge and yet barely understood, awful stories of gruesome deaths and mysterious looming bird-headed figures, time-bending weirdness, and an overriding notion of cruelty that’s hard to quantify. In short, they’re completely wonderful. So I enter Rusty Lake: Roots [official site] with a great sense of anticipation. Here’s wot I think:
I’m a sucker for cute things, especially when it comes to games. I also like puzzles. Beglitched [official site] has cuteness and puzzles in droves, and thus it looks like a game I’d enjoy thoroughly. I only need to see the tiny cans of Spam and what I can ascertain are small Game Boy-like devices to know that this is something I’d be interested in playing, and I surmise you may be too. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Doing a jig
Sometimes I keep secrets from you. As a rule, when I spend any decent amount of time playing a game, I report back about my experiences. That’s rather my job. But sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I spend entire mornings with a game that I never write about, because I’m too embarrassed to admit it to you, and perhaps even more, to my colleagues. The net result being not only have I not got any work done, I’ve turned what could have counted as work into goofing off. TODAY I SHALL BE BOLD. I spent the morning playing Animated Puzzles [official site].
Here’s a little morsel for you: an abstract puzzle game that’ll not trouble you for more than an hour. Or for infinity! simian.interface++ [official site], as it felt the need to be called, reminds me very much of Neko Games’ lovely Hoshi Saga series, but a touch flashier. You need to, with experimental mouse movement, manipulate the patterns on screen until, well, you’ve done a thing.
Game Boy? As in, that ancient blocky backlight-less 90s handheld here on the coveted pages of RPS’ House-O-PCs? Well, not exactly. But sort of. Warlock’s Tower [official site] is a tricky little movement-oriented puzzle game that sees your every move result in the loss of a single life, and in a world brimming with retro-inspired pixel-perfect adventures, this ‘un dons a Game Boy-styled monotone guise. Its challenges are far more complex than first meets the eye, though. Drop below for a trailer and a demo.
Mu Cartographer [official site] is the visual equivalent of spending an afternoon playing with an audio synthesizer just to see what absurd sounds you can make. Only here, the dials and doodads you tweak shape a roiling landscape of pretty colours for you to lose yourself in. While it makes for nice pictures, seeing it in action is something else entirely.
