Play Online Now (Unity)
mac standalone (10.4+ universal)
windows standalone
unity source
Thanks to Terry, Ian Snyder, Brog, Rinkuhero for comments/suggestions.
If you are experiencing some control lag/strangeness, then I recommend you try running the standalone version from your system in fullscreen mode.
Edit: changed one of the puzzles – Perrin and Draknek alerted me to the fact that there was some very misleading stuff going on with one of the rooms. The change makes one of the puzzles worse, but overall will work out okay I hope : /
Edit: There were some collision bugs reported as well with people getting stuck in walls – that should also be fixed now.
Edit: some more physics bugs fixed with pushing stuff around.
23 Comments
cool, it turns out setting MYSTERIOUS MUSIC to a half finished platform engine also works in THREE dimensions!
I liked this a lot.
I’ve found the solutions to the cube, “house”, pyramid, and plus. But now I’m stuck.
Now I’ve solved the mystery of the sphere, but now what?
Just the halo left.
The ending is so abrupt.
A small plus instead of a large one :/
As with all guess-what-the-designer-was-thinking puzzle games I found myself getting very frustrated when I either thought I’d found the solution but it didn’t work (cross) or else couldn’t find any other elements to interact with (ring, arrow). Otherwise though this was very engaging.
It’s lovely to explore games with interesting, foreign, and completely unexplained worlds. I think it’s something rather unique to the medium.
What did you try for the cross?
Did you have any other ‘false solutions’ you can remember?
For the cross: Lighting the grid in a cross, getting into the middle of the grid with that configuration, lighting the squares to leave an inverse cross. Lighting all squares. Trying to fit myself between the gaps in the grid in some way.
For the others: Tried fiddling with the strange pillar and the dark floor crack. Otherwise explored relatively fully for anything that seemed architecturally relevant, but couldn’t find anything.
I’d expected the sphere puzzle to be larger than it was (I got somewhat katamari damacy vibes from the layout). I was surprised when I completed it whilst trying something harder (jumping around between the other spheres).
Thanks –
“Trying to fit myself between the gaps in the grid in some way.”
A couple of people mentioned that – it was a little unexpected. The problem with these puzzles (because they’re based around primitive geometric forms) is that it’s very easy to accidentally let slip in misleading geometry. You did manage to solve the cross puzzle in the end, though, right?
Not yet, no. I’m pretty stumped.
Several of the puzzles were arbitrary to the point of being unfair, or at least uninteresting.
As the pyramid, once you have positioned yourself in the right spot, you shouldn’t need to jump. I realize you are trying to create the end points of a pyramid, but you jump so shallow that you wouldn’t think it would create the desired apex.
As the arrow, you shouldn’t need to go so far out from the line in the ground. All of the puzzles require interaction with salient features of the terrain (even as the cube, with the slit in the wall), but none of the other puzzles require you to distance yourself so much from the salient feature before triggering the win condition. Your goal is at the salient feature, not away from it.
As the cross, black-on-white vs white-on-black is arbitrary, the size of the shape you need to make is arbitrary, and the position of the shape you need to make is arbitrary (considering that the shape doesn’t fill up the entire working space). The cross puzzle was the last one I solved, and it took me so long to solve it that I considered that the checker board pattern was a red herring. Either that, or I considered I would have to position myself someplace particular far from the board after lighting the board up in a certain pattern, sort of like in the arrow puzzle.
The cross and arrow required looking at the comments for me. I think the problem with the cross is that it didn’t occur to me that there would be a need to cut off the ends of the larger cross I initially made.
As for the arrow, I agree with the above comment that going so far away is what threw me. Also, I tried that once, but I must’ve minutely strayed from the line.
Nonetheless, I didn’t find this frustrating or trite like some of the comments seemed too. I liked the atmosphere and the puzzles even when they were a little obscure.
Maybe I spoke too soon. The halo is bordering on the frustrating. :P
Thanks for all the comments –
Haha oops that was simple. I just needed some distance.
Stuck on the halo.
Overall this was fun, once you grasp the unifying theme. It does ride the fun/frustrating curve pretty hard at times (cross, arrow, and halo) and it looks like those have been pointed out already. Regarding the halo I think the problem is connecting the action to the ‘salient feature’. It is the one puzzle where the geography doesn’t immediately say “I’m part of the halo solution” and I finally got to it by process of elimination.
Ok, so tell me. What the hell do I do with the donut? Dunk it?
Ah, got it. Superb work.
That was really good. It made me think of abstract point n’ click games, sorta like Myst.
I was about to give up with the Ring/Halo piece when I casually, uh.. “walked” around the tree to go from the light-up blocks to the pyramids, when suddenly the puzzle was solved! Those sharp puzzle-solving sounds nearly make me jump!
Anyway. I beat it all. Awesome minimalist design.
I haven’t the slightest idea what to do in this game.
One Trackback/Pingback
[…] and (by the looks of things) Fract evoke a lonely, contemplative curiosity, Increpare's The Clotted Island and Three Artefacts play like a cross between a migraine and […]