Fill ’er up

Today I spent about 40 minutes with Linelith, a game by Patrick Traynor, creator of Patrick’s Parabox. Linelith came out a few years ago, almost immediately after Patrick’s Parabox, but somehow flew under my radar. Having played it now, I decided to follow Patrick on Steam so as not to miss another of his games.

Linelith starts with very little in the way of tutorial: The letters WASD and the image of a moving mouse cursor are all that is shown to you, and the rest is left to experimentation. The HUD consists only of a single progress bar that goes to 132. What resulted was a bite-size TUNIC-ish experience which left me with the mental “oh… oh! … OH!” of realizing the repercussions of what Linelith taught me.

Look again

At first glance, the screenshots of TUNIC tell any Zelda fan where it draws its inspiration. Upon playing it though (or from hearing about it from those who love it), you find the ingredient that pushes it past most games in Nintendo’s franchise. TUNIC is soaked through with riddle-like puzzles that far outclass the square-peg-in-square-hole tasks found in most Zelda games.

What it says on the tin

It took me around 80 of the game’s 150 total puzzles to consciously put the label “sokoban” on Dungeon and Puzzles. From Chinese developer Nekolyst, consisting of only one person (although with some assets from elsewhere), D&P is a prosaically-named top-down tile-based puzzle game where you kill monsters so you can open the door so you can get to the next level(s). Monsters are slaughtered using gear that needs to be collected in each self-contained level, namely a sword, a bow and arrow, a shield (for bashing enemies onto spike traps) and/or a gauntlet (for yanking enemies onto spike traps)