Puzzlin’
July 13th, 2010I don’t have any revelatory things to say today, but I feel like I should extend a few recommendations your way. You see, part of the reason I’ve been away for so long is that I’ve been on a major puzzle kick (doctor told me that confusion and frustration were excellent treatments for a hippo attack). Instead of keeping such things to myself, allow me to tell you about three such games that have used up far too much of my time.
My most recent obsession is a game for iPhones and iPod Touches called Finger Physics. It’s a solid block-stacking game that makes excellent use of the touch screen. The levels are short, often challenging, and sometimes eye-bleedingly frustrating. The automatic scrolling on some levels can piss me off, but overall it’s a great game, totally worth the 99 cents I paid for it. I have nothing else of interest to say about this one.
Next is a web-based puzzler called Amnesya. It’s reminiscent of the notpron game that a handful of my college buds obsessed over a few years back. Each puzzle is a web page with various clues hidden in it. They’re hidden anywhere and everywhere (page source, properties of the .jpg on the screen, et al.), and cracking the code might come down to anything from translating Braille to changing your computer’s clock so that the flash file will think it’s a certain time (yes, really). As you might imagine, some of the clues are so oblique that they stray into unfairness. If you decide to play and get stuck, please feel free to ask me for hints. I’m currently on level 58, and before you ask, I have done a little bit of cheating to get that far.
Now for my biggest recommendation. This is a game I first played sophomore year of college when I was working in the computer labs. I decided to replay it not long ago, and thankfully, I seem to have forgotten most of it. It’s called Planetarium, and it’s the most inventive and artistic puzzle game I’ve ever seen. Described as “a puzzle story in twelve weekly instalments”, it’s a game that’s unlike any other. Each installment (British spelling be damned!) has three puzzles and other pages that form each chapter of the story. It’s about a girl with perfect foresight but no memory traveling around with a mathemagician who… you know, the story itself is immaterial. It’s interesting then, that what I love most about Planetarium is the writing. The chapters are written in such a thoughtful, wry style that it doesn’t matter that I don’t care about the plot. Even when the puzzles are too easy, a newly unlocked chapter is nothing short of a treat. If you can devote a bit of time every week for the next twelve weeks, give Planetarium a try. It’s fantastic.
Nope, no jokes this time around. I just wanted to expose an embarrassing bit about how nerdly I am. If any of you starts one of these games, let me know what you think.
-Darrell