I couldn’t resist. While compiling my last post on atypical Puzzlescript games, I came across many more than I had space or time to list. Which brings us to this post.
These games all push the Puzzlescript envelope. They demonstrate what can achieved when a developer tests the ostensible limits of their tool and then pushes beyond. And none of them involves pushing crates.
You do push things in this game, but not crates. Theseus is stuck in a maze with the minotaur and he needs your help. Theseus is pretty dumb and he’ll walk down any hallway that you open up for him. You move around the perimeter of the maze and push rows of tiles to rearrange the corridors, ideally guiding Theseus safely past the creature that’s stalking him. It’s much easier to arrange for the two to meet up, but that’s the challenge.
In Emerita (by the great Aaron Steed, you’re a little crab digging through the sand for littler critters to eat. The sands shift as you dig beneath them, altering the landscape and potentially stranding you. You just have to grab all the prey without getting trapped. After some observation, you’ll be able to predict how sand will fall, so you can plan your route before you go hunting.
Battle-Mage proves that an arena shooter can be made in Puzzlescript, at least a turn-based one. It also features a spell selection mechanic that works well with Puzzlescript’s limited controls. You have 4 spells at your disposal, which I’ll leave you to discover. Hitting the action key will open up your spell menu, displayed as 4 icons surrounding the mage. Tap the appropriate direction key to choose a spell, then select the direction in which to cast it. It’s quite hard and I can never take out many monsters before they inevitably overcome me.
Farbs’ Dungeon Janitor is one of the few Puzzlescript games that’s made me laugh. As the titular janitor, it’s your job to mop up green slime. I don’t know if you’ve ever mopped up green slime before, but man, that stuff gets everywhere! If you don’t trap it against a wall, you just end up spreading it all around. It’s tougher than herding cats (but more fun).
The four color theorem of mathematics states that any 2D surface divided up into any number of regions can be filled in by only 4 colors, so that no bordering regions share the same color. In this game, you have to prove it. Move your cursor from region to region, cycling through the palette and assigning a color to each one. It starts easily enough, but gets trickier as the number of regions increases. And each colored-in screen looks like a low-key work of modern art.
It’s golf! In Puzzlescript! This actually plays more like a puzzle game than a straight-up golf game. As in normal golf, you have to get the ball in the hole within a certain number of swings. But here, you know exactly where each ball is going to land before you hit it. To take a swing, position yourself around the ball and press towards it to see the direction of your swing, then press in that direction to increase your swing’s strength. The action button sends your ball flying to the position you selected. Later, you’ll have to get some ducks out of your way, so use that same technique. Protip for the easily frustrated: You can skip a level…
…by just walking up to the hole and hitting the action button.
What’s this, another Puzzlescript sports game? This time it’s American football and you’re the quarterback. There’s no passing in this game, so you just have to grab the ball and run it to the end zone on each screen. Of course, this is easier said than done, as members of the opposing team are trying to tackle you. You have some teammates of your own, but they just stand there and act as barricades. The puzzles generally involve you steering the enemy into your teammates so they can’t make it to the end zone and turn into linebackers, ready to intercept you before you make a touchdown. With so many moving pieces, it gets pretty complicated to plan a successful run.
There are more sports-themed games made in Puzzlescript than I realized when I set out to make this list. If you count professional wrestling as a sport, then this is another fine example of one. In Suplexer, you can perform exactly one wrestling move (guess which one), and you have to use it to throw your opponents out of the ring and onto targets. Like the other sports games here, it’s more puzzle than action. It’s really a variation of pushing crates onto switches, but the crates are wrestlers and your push ability operates in an unusual way.
Heavy Sword is a turn-based dungeon crawler, similar to Aaron Steed’s Ending in its focus on precise movement and bumping into enemies before they bump into you. You lug around a giant blade, and it’s so heavy that you can only drag it behind you or push it in front of you. Dragging it around is the only way to change its position relative to yourself. You need to learn how each monster behaves, then avoid its attacks while awkwardly getting your sword into position, before finally delivering the killing blow.
the gods await me is a collection of interesting game mechanics, but I’m not sure if there’s an ending to the game or if you’re simply meant to survive as long as possible. The vast, perhaps infinite, landscape, the epic title, and the lack of an obvious goal suggest that there’s more than what I’ve found. Here’s what I’ve discovered so far. You trek across a plain dotted with grass, rock, and water, pursued by a horde of humanoids. This is another game in which bumping into an enemy kills them and being bumped kills you. You leave bloody corpses in your wake, which can be pushed around and used to block other attackers. You can’t walk through water, but you can submerge a corpse and walk right over it. Stone will also block your way, but you can bump into it a few times and break through. Every action you take allows the horde to move, so you must constantly be aware of any openings they have and what escape routes you have. Playing this, I feel like I’m on a quest of some sort, but it’s probably just a game of survival. Regardless, it evokes more of a sense of wonder than any other Puzzlescript game I’ve played.
There’s not much to say about this one other than it’s a really good demake of Closure by the developer of Closure, Tyler Glaiel.
All Puzzlescript games are playable in a browser.
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