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13 reviews · 5 essays
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Lighting as a Verb — The Grammar of Puzzles Where Light Rewrites Existence
Closure, Contrast, Lightmatter, and Creaks all turn on the same single verb — lighting something — yet make it mean four entirely different things: existence, movement, life and death, or an enemy's true form. I compare them as one verb-minimalism case study.
Elshamy et al.: Read the player's skill, then redraw the level itself — Fukai Reads
A Scientific Reports paper from Elshamy and colleagues at E-JUST on inferring player skill and rewriting the terrain of the level itself. Where conventional dynamic difficulty adjustment tunes enemy health and item drops, this pipeline rearranges floors, gaps and enemies in place. Skill classification reached 97.82% accuracy; 74.1% of rewritten levels remained completable.
Flipping Gravity as a Verb — The Grammar of Puzzles Where Down Changes
VVVVVV, And Yet It Moves, Manifold Garden, Etherborn. I trace how the verb of flipping gravity — moving the one assumption players never question, which way is down — widened from a discrete whole-screen flip into continuous, surface-bound gravity.
Soundtrack: Psychonauts — Every time you enter a head, the genre changes
Each time you dive into someone else's head, the entire genre of the music swaps out. What Peter McConnell wrote for Psychonauts is twenty tracks that each seem to come from a different record shelf: flamenco, Twilight-Zone eeriness, a summer-camp folk tune. Why does something so promiscuous never turn into clutter? Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart through a lens you can carry back to your own composing.
The Lost Vikings (1993) — A Classic of Cooperative Puzzling, Three Bodies Moved One at a Time
Released in 1993 by Silicon & Synapse (later Blizzard Entertainment) through Interplay, The Lost Vikings is a cooperative puzzle in which the player controls three differently-skilled vikings one at a time and must lead all of them to the exit. In Japan it was distributed by T&E Soft under the title Viking no Daimeiwaku. This essay re-reads its era, the quality of thought its three-way cooperation produced, and the lineage that runs from Lemmings and Gobliiins to today's cooperative puzzles.
Related reviews
Teslagrad 2
A 2D puzzle-platformer that climbs an abandoned tower above a northern fjord by flipping magnetic poles and carrying momentum. Rain Games keeps the wordless storytelling and painted backdrops of the original, but steers from stop-and-think puzzles toward sliding and flow.
puzzleplatformermetroidvaniaEscape Goat 2
A 2D puzzle platformer about escaping a trap-filled stronghold with a goat and its mouse companion. Each room is a single screen, solved with jumps, an immortal mouse that crawls walls and stands on switches, and a magic hat that swaps the goat's position with the mouse's. Over a hundred rooms across ten zones, from MagicalTimeBean in 2014.
puzzlepuzzle-platformerplatformerRiME
A boy wakes on an unfamiliar island after a storm and runs, climbs, swims and shouts at the stonework, guided by a red fox toward the peak of a distant tower — a five-chapter puzzle adventure with no combat, no HUD and no dialogue, released by Tequila Works in 2017.
puzzleadventureexplorationHue
A 2D puzzle-platformer where one button swaps the world's background between eight colours, making anything of that colour vanish. Walls, boxes and lasers are all handled through colour as you restore hue to a grey world and search for a missing mother. From Fiddlesticks Games.
puzzlepuzzle-platformerplatformerElecHead
A 2D puzzle-platformer where you pilot a robot whose head is a battery: touch a floor or wall to conduct electricity and open the way. Throw the head to power distant switches, racing a ten-second timer while separated. Japanese solo developer NamaTakahashi pushes a single verb — conduct-on-contact — to its limit.
puzzleplatformerSemblance
A 2D puzzle-platformer where you dent and raise the very ground to build your own footholds, threading past spikes and lasers to return each essence to the world-trees. Nyamakop's debut from South Africa, built on a single verb — deform — in a world with no 'hardness'.
puzzlepuzzle-platformerplatformerGunpoint
A 2D stealth-puzzle where you rewire a building's security with the mouse and trap its guards on the way in. A single verb — 'connect' — branches into thousands of solutions, and a level editor extends it without end. Reportedly made almost single-handedly by Tom Francis.
puzzlestealthplatformerTeslagrad
A hand-drawn 2D puzzle-platformer about climbing an abandoned Tesla Tower on magnetic polarity - like poles repel, opposite attract - plus a blink through electric barriers. There is no text or dialogue; the story is told entirely through murals and backgrounds. By Norway's Rain Games.
puzzleplatformermetroidvaniaContrast
A puzzle-platformer where you move light sources to reshape the shadows on a wall, then slip into those shadows as a 2D silhouette to cross them as platforms. As Dawn, a young girl's imaginary friend, you solve a story set in a vaudevillian, film-noir 1920s city with a single light-and-shadow verb. A 2013 game by Compulsion Games.
puzzleplatformerINSIDE
A 2.5D narrative puzzle-platformer that guides a hunted boy ever rightward through a dark dystopian facility, solving with push-pull, water, light, and the power to remote-control other bodies. Wordless, told entirely through its environment — Playdead's follow-up to LIMBO.
puzzleplatformeratmosphericBraid, Anniversary Edition
A single-player puzzle-platformer where you rewind, pause and bend the rules of time, world by world, to clear 2D hazards and assemble jigsaw pieces. Thekla's remaster of the 2008 indie classic — fully repainted, with hours of developer commentary.
puzzleplatformerlogicThe Pedestrian
A 2D puzzle-platformer where you rearrange and wire together public signs, building a path through the signage for a little stick figure to cross a living city.
puzzleplatformerassemblyRecursed
A 2D puzzle that translates recursion into a tiny pixel-art room. The grandfather of Patrick's Parabox.
puzzleplatformerrecursive
