Puzzle

i saw her too, with lasers is the sequel to i saw her standing there, though the gameplay is somewhat different.

Unlike the first game, you do not play one of the lovers, but a mad scientist who uses lasers and holograms to guide the lovers together. They are both zombies now (the male became one at the end of the first game), so do not kill each other when they touch. And the "platforming" aspect is gone, as you do not directly control any character on screen, nor are jumps possible.

Instead, it has much more of the feeling of a switch-controlled puzzler than an action game, though there is still a bit of a performative aspect: often, you need to switch quickly from one control to another to prevent the loss of one of the zombies. The basic scheme is similar, however: on each level, guide the lovers to one another.

As with the first game, it's a nicely tuned Flash puzzler with clean, intelligent level design, and worth your while if you like puzzle games.

i saw her standing there is a nice little puzzle platformer with a fairly novel core mechanic and a somewhat disquieting backstory.

You control the player character with WASD or the arrow keys; "up" is a jump. A second (pink, inevitably) character moves toward you when you are sufficiently close; your goal is to guide her to a cage ("I loved her but she was a zombie, so I kept her safe in a cage"). Since she is a zombie, if she touches you, you die and must restart the level; but apparently she doesn't mind being caged, because a heart appears above her when you guide her there.

Not that it's really relevant to gameplay, but why is it that when games go here, the active character is always gendered male? And while I don't have any moral qualms about mutually consensual restraint (in face I, ah... better not go there), this is a pretty disquieting subtext from a gender political point of view.

The zombie-girl cannot jump, and in some levels, if you are not careful, you may guide her into a gap in a platform, causing her to die (and of course you can mistime a jump and do likewise).

As is typical with puzzle games, new puzzle elements are added over time, including risers, enemy zombies that can kill either of you, switchable laser barriers, and "holograms" of you that you can trigger to guide the zombie-girl even if you yourself are not present. There's a tasty combination of solver's uncertainty (the difficulty of solving puzzles) and performative uncertainty (the uncertainty inherent in any skill-and-action game). And the story is carried in tight, evocative texts, two lines on each level, the first displayed on level load and the second when solved. Art style is minimalist, but evocative and appropriate to the game's aesthetic.

Zendo is an inductive reasoning game by Kory Heath. Heath reworked Eluesis, a game designed to play with a standard 52-card deck by Robert Abott. Eluesis was first published in Scientific American, June 1959, but has been published several times since in card game rulebooks. Heath created a complete boxed set with colorful transparent pyramids, guessing tokens, sample puzzles, rules and a new Buddhist theme rather than the original Judeo-Christian theme. Zendo is more colorful and tactile because it uses 3D pyramids rather than standard cards.

POP: Methodology Experiment One is a "methodology experiment," because Rob Lach created the music first -- and then designed a minigame for each song intended to fit the emotional feel and impulse of the tune. Not surprisingly, the music is quite good; the gameplay less so, though still interesting.

It's carried in nostalgic, lo-fi graphics reminiscent of the early arcade, and the gameplay varies greatly from minigame to minigame. If the controls and gameplay is a little rough, that's perhaps not surpising, since this is seven games in one. Each minigame lasts about three minutes -- not surprising; so do the songs. Three minutes is supposedly the "perfect" length for pop music, at least if you want radio play.

Plith is a simple puzzle game tuned to a casual level of difficulty, but with nicely rendered graphics and unobjectional music.

Each level consists of a peg board, and some initial arrangement of gears -- typically including one red one and one green one. The objective is to place additional gears on the pegs, so that the red gear will ultimately be able to turn the green gear. The difficulty in doing so is two-fold; firstly, putting a gear on some pegs will prevent a solution; and secondly, you have no control over what type of gear you will be served next. Sometimes you want a big one, and are given a small one, and have to try to find an appropriate place to put it.

Robot Taco! Taco! is a nicely tuned puzzle platformer in which you play a robot with a detachable head. When detached, the two can move independently; the head can fly and shoot laser beams to destroy enemies, while the body can jump. If the body jumps into the head as it flies over head, they reconnect, and it becomes a "super jump," allowing access to higher platforms.

Much of the puzzle solving involves using the capabilities of the two items in combination. For example, in the level shown in the illustration here, when the red button is held down, the red barriers are removed, freeing the enemies there; the trick is to position the head to shoot at them before using the body to jump on the button, switching quickly back to the head; you can kill only one of the enemies, the other will approach the body from the other side, so you must switch back to the body and platform up to the head. (The enemies can fall, but not jump, so the other will be trapped at the bottom level.)

Photon Baby is an excellent puzzle platformer, with NES-ish graphics and an interesting puzzle style. You play a little fellow with a sort of gun; while babysitting, the child you were caring for was kidnapped by a vampire bat, and you evidently have to fight through thirty platform levels featuring vampires and bats to get the brat back.

Vampires wear differently colored capes; some surfaces of each level are colored lines. You bullets are gray when fired, but take on the color of one of these lines; and a vampire can only be killed by a bullet the color of his or her cape. This is where the puzzle aspect comes in; you must figure out how to slay each vampire, given the organization of the level, and the positions of the colored lines.

Mr. Condyle's Escape is a good example of the principle that one way to create innovative games is to take mechanics from different game styles and cross them. In this instance, Pierre is creating a platformer -- but one that is turn-based, not based on interface mastery.

A set of tools allow you to plan Mr. Condyle's motion -- moving left or right, waiting, or jumping. Once you have decided on a course of action, you click a "play" button. Mr. Condyle does each action in turn -- and, in turn, cannons fire, platforms move, and so on. In other words, at first you simply try some actions, and watch them play, getting a sense of the timing (cannon 1 fires on turn 2 and every other turn thereafter, for instance). Inevitably, the first time you try to complete a level, you will fail, because you don't understand the timing of events; and it is likely that multiple attempts will be required before success.

Escape Goat is an excellent little puzzle platformer with a sort of NES sensibility and well-crafted levels. About the only bad thing I can say about it is that it's too short -- if you're a skilled platformer, you can get through it in under two hours -- but that is, in its own way, praise.

You play a purple goat who, according to what passes for a story, is attempting to escape from prison, which evidently involves getting through a set of platform levels. The challenge of the game is less in the platforming itself than in puzzle-solving; the controls are crisp and responsive, there's no combat as such, and the main challenges navigational.

Dinos in Space has little to do with either dinosaurs or space. Rather, it is a well-conceived little puzzle game -- conceptually quite simple, but with the ability to pose puzzles that take real cognition to solve.

One or more dino-emitters are located in a square grid; when you press the space bar, they spit out dinos in a particular direction. Each dinosaur must be guided to a same-colored space station, also located in the grid. Your main tools for doing so are arrows, of which you have a limited selection to place in the grid; grey ones affect the path of all dinos, while colored ones affect only dinos of the same color. In some levels, you also have teleporters, which move dinos from one square to another. The number and mix of tools is strictly limited in each level, so that there is typically only one, or a handful, of solutions.