There was a time when I thought Puzzle Quest and the like formed a signpost pointing to a bright future, in which themes and genres would become the bricks in a huge architectural toy chest. Who wouldn’t want to play a pinball game in which highscores and skillshots translate into the bank balance and item unlocks for a family of Sim-like Little Computer People? Or a game in which solving logic puzzles makes a car go faster and faster and faster until Lewis Hamilton throws a strop.

When I first read about Moon Hunters, I thought it would be something along those lines. Play a puzzle thing with some RPG-lite conventions attached to it and ‘construct’ a mythology. Then I watched the Kickstarter pitch video (it’s already funded) and gawped in amazement.

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What price a life? Specifically, what price a simian life? Specifically, what price a helper monkey trained in thievery? … [visit site to read more]

As much as I’d like to spin around inside a washing machine, I know how that ends. But lovely, lovely video games can let us do impossible things, and games like Super Hexagon offer that dream of spinning around inside a round thing filled with jagged edges and crushing surfaces. oO has been out for a while but only twirled before my eyes today. It’s a one-button dodge ‘em up about spinning around and jumping between conjoined circles filled increasingly with death.

It’s free and it’s fun and it’s difficult and it’s late in the day so let’s all lark about a bit playing it.

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A Rite From The Stars is an adventure game, inspired by nineties classics and modern marvels alike. The setting and plot are interesting, but we’ll move on to that in a moment because there are far more important statements on the Kickstarter page. Developers Risin’ Goat (only enough in the budget for one ‘g’) claim that the game will not feature ‘pixel hunts’, ‘pointless walks’ or ‘boring inventory management (also known as “Use the stick in everything until it works”)’. I reckon all three of those things should have been left on the Lucas and Sierra cutting-room floor a long time ago, along with almost every puzzle in The Dig and the many deaths of Roger Wilco. A Rite From The Stars isn’t simply emulating the past and I’m grateful for that. The Kickstarter has eight days left on the clock and $15,000 of a $40,000 target left to raise.

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FACT: A Dark Room was one of last year’s most bemusing browser games. Initially, it seems like a survivalist-themed Cookie Clicker or Candy Box, a mouse-mauling series of numbers that rise toward the impossibility of infinity. Not so.

FACT: There are four hundred and six Match 3 games released every minute. They’re mostly released onto app stores rather than the wilds of the PC so you might not have seen all> of them, but they’re out there. They’re mostly identical except for the manner of thing that must be matched – sometimes it’s gems, sometimes it’s fruits, very occasionally it is (probably) gonads.

FACT: Double Speak Games, developers of A Dark Room, have released a Match 3 game that is different to the rest. It’s called Gridland, it’s free and it will make your Thursday soar.

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A card as elegant as ivory flutters across the ballroom, caressed by a hundred fingertips as it makes its way to the periphery of the room, where you stand, watching and waiting. For me>, the crinkling of your brow speaks the query that your lips cannot. Even the gentle rustle of a bustle is capable of distracting the Duke from the strings that he so inexpertly scrapes. To escape from the dreariness of this corseted formality would be splendid. Perhaps the card that you now hold offers an alternative:

This Saturday from 7PM at The Blue Posts, London, will be host to a gathering of splendid people. Games of Gin Rummy, Whist and Cosmic Encounter may occur. Suggestions and enquiries should be directed t’ward The Forum.

How radiant!

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After the last time we saw 4D puzzle-platformer Miegakure, when I was baffled by it all, I went back and re-read Flatland>. Learning to think in a new spatial dimension we’re unable to see or experience can’t be that difficult, can it? Creator Marc ten Bosch has finally explained quite how it works with a new trailer, showing how one can slip into the fourth dimension to walk through (or, technically, around) a wall. I think I’m starting to get it. Maybe. Come see.

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Ah, Chess 2. A joke made real? Seems like it, only they’re not joking. This is a straight up remix and rebalance intended to shuffle the game away from its standard opening/closing moves and to fix the “problems” of the venerable chequered board format. But how can that work? And more importantly: does it work?>

Read on for my handful of chess anecdotes and some writing about Chess 2, too. Toooo. … [visit site to read more]

Oh Hexcells. How I love thee. As a man obsessed with puzzle games, it is with no small amount of consideration that I say Hexcells is the best new puzzle in the last few years. I’ve jabbered my delight over both Hexcells and sequel Hexcells Plus previously, and I’m giddy-thrilled to see that there’s to be a third and final game in the series, out next month, called Hexcells Infinite. And it’s out on Monday.

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…final?!

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Seems to me that many readers enjoyed the demanding action of hets, so here’s another tough action-platformer. Roguelight, like everything else in this world, is sort of a rogue-like-like too. In a way. It definitely takes place in 25 levels of procedurally generated dungeons, anyway.

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