Slidin’ away…
Somewhere along the line, I developed a certain weakness for sliding-block puzzles.
I’m not quite sure how it happened, honestly; Apple’s bundled Puzzle desktop accessory always drove me nuts, and I never bothered to finish the World’s Hardest Trick the first time around. Yet somewhere between gnotski during Computational Mathematics lectures and a surprisingly high-quality implementation of Rush Hour during the down moments of my first internship, I learned to stop stressing and love shuffling tiles across a board.
There are a number of games of this type available on the web; a basic puzzle of this sort is pretty easy to implement and have therefore been a staple of newbie flash developers for years. I usually don’t find them particularly notable (although I would like to work in a plug for Wooden Path), but sometimes something really standout comes along.
The Indie Games blog linked last week to a flash project called Continuity. Continuity implements the really clever idea of taking a sliding-block puzzle and combining it with a 2D platformer- the blocks that you’re moving around are pieces of a level, and your ultimate goal is to guide your character through it, collect any keys, and reach a red door. Moving pieces whose edges match next to each other allows you to move between them.
The game starts out fairly simple, but the later puzzles become increasingly mind-bending. It’s a solid implementation of a really clever idea, and I enjoyed it tremendously.
- HC