Perfectly Peculiar Pixels [#29]

When one mentions puzzle games, I, perhaps erroneously, think most people think of Tetris, Candy Crush, perhaps Angry Birds. At a more basic level, you might think mini-games from much more elaborate, mostly third person games. Today I want to go over several borderline mental ideas, that made for wonderful games, that don’t require flash, pomp, or 2000 people to complete. The age range for these is wider than what we usually cover, but perhaps it opens your eyes to just how wide this genre can go.

There is no shortage of games where you absorb abilities from your environment. Mostly it has to do with the garments, think Mario Odyssey or A Hat in Time. Kirby used to do it when it only had a few shades of green to work with back on the original Gameboy. But Henry Halfhead takes it a step further, in that, well, for one, you’re one of the more bizarre minimalist characters ever made, but also that you directly ‘haunt’ objects in the game. The developers cleverly used a minimalistic style, avoiding the problem of either having objects that can’t be haunted, or just having distracting clutter. The game tells a very simple non verbal story as you play. This is by all means a game for children, but if you’re looking to make puzzle games, I would argue it’s a must play among newer titles.

In “I Am Bread” you play as a slice of, yeah, you guessed. Your objective, is to become toast, without becoming inedible. Your edibility meter slowly drops as you touch dirty surfaces like walls and floors. The controls are about as weird as the premise itself. You control each of the four sides of the loaf, which are dynamically switched depending on the point of view, in order to be as intuitive as they can be. In the game you make your way across kitchens, lather yourself in jelly, get books and VHS tapes with bread puns out of your way. All this in order to reach a toaster, a stove top, or in fact any other sufficiently hot enough surface in order to become evenly toasted on both sides. I firmly believe this is the kind of creativity that fuelled the early stages of industry, and has the potential to move it forward, not another epic multi million dollar game.

Around the 2010s, there was a slew of games based around nearly-impossibly-to-control characters. One can get a decent grasp of how an airplane functions from Microsoft Flight Simulator (though X-Plane is the one that’s certified by the FAA as a learning tool). However, you probably wouldn’t want to give any Surgeon Simulator player a scalpel, and let them have at it. Objectively, the controls are terrible. Subjectively, and certainly paradoxically, that’s where the comedy is derived from. At least half of it. Propping up the other half is diegetic voice over following your misadventures. Think of it as a, pun naturally intended, a dad game (think Power Wash’, or Viscera Cleanup Detail), where the challenge comes from the handicap of terrible controls. Bottom line, you’ll either love it or hate it, depending on whether or not it provides the flavour of humour you enjoy.

If you’ve been a regular reader, you will be familiar with Amanita design’s games, as some of them were conveniently provided by the Epic store for free. This week, along side Project Winter, it’s Samorost 2’s turn. You can tell by it being a point and click adventure game, that rescuing your puppy kidnapped by aliens will be less of a John Wick affair, and more of a slow burn. Like other Amanita games, it is built around the idea you don’t need a lot of words to tell a story, or even communicate with other characters. Great if you’re short a writer, and/or a reasonable localization service for your game, but obviously putting more emphasis on your UI and game design.

Tremendously Touching Teenage Tale, “to a T”