My appreciation for Stephen Lavelle, aka Increpare, is too much for one blog. I’ve already made a few of his games the weekly waste of time, but at the rate this guy is churning out mind-bending and downright confusing puzzle games he’s already overdue for more blog coverage. He’s another smattering of Lavelle’s three-quarters baked nuggets of brilliance.
One thing that most Increpare games have in common is a sense of exploration. The only instruction in most of these games is “click to start.” After that, it’s up to you to figure out the laws that govern the many pixilated game worlds he creates. Take for example Kompression which involves finding similar numbers in a unique shape to make them disappear. This creates another number and sucks in surrounding numbers to fill up the empty space created by your move. I’ve completed the game, and I’m still not entirely clear how the number compression and creation works. Trial and error is encouraged if for no other reason than to try and figure out how to get to the end.
Untris is an aptly named puzzle that merely takes the Tetris mold and reverses it. Pull the standard four-block shapes you know from the original game and watch them fly back up and out of the board. This seems easy at first but soon you realize that without very careful consideration you’re left with shapes that can’t be removed. I assume the game can be mastered, but my mind was quickly blown and I gave up all hopes of completely clearing a level (although I didn’t stop playing). That’s assuming there are other levels.
Working from the box-pushing game you’ve likely seen before, Travelling throws a wrench in the works by breaking up the screen into repeating parts that collapse into each other as you complete the puzzle. I doubt that description helped, so you might just want to check out the game to see what I mean.
And as a bonus, SOCO0 (Or something like that) is another six levels that start easy and get stupidly difficult in short order.
Go to Increpare’s homepage for, I don’t know, a billion other games he’s made. And if you can beat a level of Untris, I want to know about it.
This article appears in July 15 • 2011.
