SERIES
The Design of Undo
Undo has come to feel like air, but the design choice is never neutral. Where on the spectrum of forgiveness should your game sit? This hub collects the ethics essay and the reviews where Undo design stands out.
Related Essays
- The Ethics of Undo — Forgiveness or Punishment
One button reshapes the entire experience. Sokoban's restart, Braid's rewind, Baba Is You's unlimited Undo. A look at the dividing line between designs that forgive trials and designs that punish them.
- Legible Failure — Making the Dead End Readable in Puzzles
In puzzles, failure is not death but the dead end. From Sokoban's irreversible push to Stephen's Sausage Roll's invisible stalls and the soft-lock-free design of The Witness and COCOON, I examine the design question of whether failure can be read, not whether it should be punished.
Related Reviews
- Baba Is You
A language Sokoban where you push the rules themselves around.
meta-puzzlesokoban-like - Stephen's Sausage Roll
Grill a sausage evenly on all six sides. The difficulty is almost a joke.
sokoban-like - Patrick's Parabox
A textbook example of recursive Sokoban, structured as a master class in pedagogy.
sokoban-likemeta-puzzle - COCOON
A world inside an orb, an orb inside that world, all the way down.
meta-puzzlenarrative-puzzleassembly - The Witness
More than five hundred line-drawing panels. Observation itself becomes the verb.
observationnarrative-puzzlepathfinding
