i will agree with you that it is “unwinnable” and “frustrating”. i cannot agree on any other points. i’m at a loss to understand how this can be a “great game” when it is intentionally pointless and without purpose or enjoyment. i will allow that there is some enjoyment to be had if you really enjoy pressing keys. this was interesting for approximately 30 seconds.
It reminds me of the mega corp I work for.
Took me a while but I got to the spiral section and through the hole, or whatever that was. The end credits song was… odd…
Reminds me of Rocky’s Boots - well, the aesthetic, anyway.
Just wanted to say Bravo!
There’s an end section? I played a dozen or two squares before I bailed. Loads of fun… the self-similar logic kinda reminds me of the tesseract from Interstellar. Fun! I was exploring creating an upward-traversing Jacob’s ladder of squares to the far right hopping onto squares hopping into a column of hopping squares. Definitely as playable as and less frustrating than jumpman.
I loved Jumpman.
This…? Meh.
If there’s a way to enjoy this game, I haven’t figured it out yet. The gameplay kinda reminds me of Time Donkey.
There are great poems that take about 30 seconds to read. There are more metrics to judge art than how many hours of your dumb life it can fill.
Oh, I enjoyed Jumpman also… there was just a frustrating level I could not get past (the one that you can’t rotate and there’s that weird hedghog thing with the long nose on the top platform that moves fast and follows your horizontal position after a slight delay)… never for the life of me figured that level out, so the game stopped there. :\
I tend to like open-ended games. SeaDave’s Small Worlds worked very well for me, even with several replays. Beschizza’s minimalist RPG was fun until I won, then I was done with it. The open ended games permit me to alter my goals and play to different ends… for example when I get tired of seeing how big I can make my far right hopping column, I might play for exploration; or for diversity of endpoints in each cycle; or for some other shape/movement/position pattern, or…
I tried it for a minute, hated it and left. Then I went back and spent about 15 minutes playing, really to get a full understanding of what was happening. I didn’t find any spiral hole or end credits. It seems to loop around but if there is more than the steps and that tall column where you just stack up, I don’t know. Is it a game? Is it art? Does it destroy brains?
I remember finishing Jumpman, but it was years ago, so I can’t remember any solutions.
I like there to be some focus to games like these.
More like this sort of thing:
How can it possibly be “addicting”? You play it for three minutes, see the entire gameworld (all, what, four or five platforms of it), understand how it works, nod approvingly, and close the window.
I mean, it’s a clever, cheeky little thing and much respect to the author; there’s nothing wrong with bite-size gaming. But there isn’t anything to do except grasp the mechanic, get to the second floor, and then perceive that there’s nowhere else to go. The idea of enjoying it for more than 10 or 15 minutes makes me think of Homestar yanking around a joystick connected to an unplugged console while yelling “I’m about to win!”
A game isn’t a poem. “How many hours of your dumb life it can fill” is actually a pretty good metric for a game.
Is there a way to play it on an iPad or must it be played on a computer?
One must not take Boing Boing’s headlines so literally. I don’t really think Cory was expecting people to play for hours and hours addictively and actually destroy their brains. He was just pointing out a very cool and fun concept game that likely will amuse many readers for 10 or 15 minutes. It did for me.
did you mean to insult me by inferring that my life is dumb? i can’t decide.
regardless, i absolutely agree with your point. i think my initial frustration was based on an expectation that wasn’t met - the term “game” to me implies a little more structure, goals, etc… i think if it had been introduced in a different context as “interactive art” or an “anti-game” or something, i might have been more receptive to it.
also, after reading other comments, it’s clear that i didn’t spend enough time on it to realize that there’s actually logic to the gameplay. maybe later i’ll fire it up again.
I found it really enjoyable. Played for a while, stacked up all my screens to the left, then sent them off into the wall less space to the left of where everything was being generated.
I enjoyed them sailing through space for what seemed like eternity, then several became stuck in space, so my screens eventually became the obstacles which other screens bounced off.
Playing without goals or structure was actually quite exciting. What a cool toy.
Spent 15 minutes, experienced a bit of reverie.
I certainly feel like I won. Maybe that was the moment my mind was destroyed.
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