8/9/2023 0 Comments Spacechem nothing works![]() ![]() I admit I found the UI a little confusing perhaps a dedicated tutorial would clear this up. In the levels I played, I had mods to mess with the “gravity” and “bounce”. So what’s the trick? Well you also get to play around with the physics. Think you need three more balls to finish the level? Think again. You’re going to have to work out how to complete each hack with the limited tools at your disposal – for example, your balls are finite. Limitations are what makes this a puzzle game rather than just some physics toy. ![]() You choose the angle and let the ball do all the work. Hackshot is the latest spin on the artillery game, where hacking is represented as firing a ball to knock out some processes. Which is a prize almost as good as Crashbook. Turns out it was one of the Draknek New Voices Puzzle Grant winners. But I sat down in front of Hackshot in the Curios section (the WASD equivalent of Rezzed’s Leftfield Collection) completely sure this was a game I had once talked about. Somewhere in my dark and desolate mind, there is a false memory that I featured Hackshot in a Crashbook post. It felt like I was navigating a Carpenter Brut synthwave track and this… this I liked so much I played it three times. This time I was a character called Saito who was skating to escape some inner turmoil. And all along the way, Zoe has to pick up shiny diamonds to improve her performance for the level. ![]() Her bodyguard turns into a literal giant and Zoe skates up a skyscraper to evade him. While there was nothing else to draw upon – I didn’t get any of the narrative decisions or conversations that current gameplay videos show – this segment seemed more representational. I tried the first one which was an action game where this girl Zoe skates away from her bodyguard, all the time laughing maniacally. There was nothing about the Road 96 imagery that automatically appealled to me.Īt WASD, it seemed there were just two bits of the game available for “replay”. I sit in front of games I might ignore otherwise. This week I plonked myself in front of Road 96: Mile 0 because that’s what I do at gaming expos. It got some accolades but obviously not enough to reach me. But it’s also clearly got some story going on. According to Steam, it’s a “procedurally generated road trip”. So there’s this game called Road 96 (Digixart, 2021) which I’d never heard of before. Sokobond Express is scheduled to be released some time this year. My early impression is that Sokobond Express is a hard game. Looking forward to this, even though I eventually graveyarded the original Sokobond because I got stuck. ![]() For example, while travelling, the molecule can pass outside the puzzle playfield just fine – but only while travelling: no part of it can lie outside the border when it reaches the endpoint. Although I’ve only seen a few levels, I could already see some interesting rules in the game. The core idea just works so well, although visually I can’t help but be reminded of SpaceChem (Zachtronics, 2011), that classic game I’ve only played once for five minutes.īecause so much changes between the start and end of your atomic train journey, Sokobond Express shows an echo of the resulting molecule as you draw every new segment of track. There were eleven levels in the demo at WASD and I finished every one of them. “When Draknek saw it, we loved the way it mashed up elements from Sokobond and Cosmic Express, and knew immediately we wanted to make it an official sequel.” The presskit explains what happened next: It was a free game called Subatomic Wire with twenty levels, written by Jose Hernandez. Sokobond Express started as a mashup of two of Alan Hazelden’s classic puzzle titles: Sokobond (Hazelden & Lee, 2013) and Cosmic Express (Cosmic Engineers, 2015). The first episode of a short series on games I discovered at WASD 2023. ![]()
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