Wendi Yan
Wendi Yan built a puzzle game out of Daoist inner alchemy
You move through a science-fiction landscape as a bundle of qi, aligning your own breath with the planet's carbon cycle. Meditation as mechanic, scripture as technology.
Puzzle
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Get in the mood for a spring clean with a new zen puzzler
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Empty (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android) By DustyRoom It’s almost time for the big spring clean this year, which might mean you need something to get you in the appropriate head space. Empty could
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Night Lights hides a whole other world behind its shadows
“Things are different at night.” A game based on this small sentence could go in any direction, really, but the most obvious path is probably towards horror. Not for Moscow-based game maker Artem Cheranev. He went with making a 2D puzzle game that uses light and shadow so you can move between differ
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Get ready for the twisty geometry of Euclidean Lands to arrive this year
One videogame that should be on your list of ones to watch in 2017 is, without a doubt, Euclidean Lands. It’s the work of Miro Straka, a Slovenian architecture student at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, who decided to make a puzzle game in his spare time. After a few years he’s coming to a
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Videogames are finally experimenting with the time loop of Groundhog Day
Before I had even watched Groundhog Day (1993), my childhood was fringed with the fantasy of alternate experiences of time due to a British children’s TV series called Bernard’s Watch (1995-2005). Bernard, the lucky bugger, had a stopwatch that could freeze time. Each episode he’d perform this mirac
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The independent studio behind some of Lara Croft GO’s best levels
Lara Croft GO came out for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita on December 3rd this year and brought with it a time-exclusive set of levels. Called “Mirror of Spirits,” these levels take the grid-based puzzles of the game’s dioramas in a radically new direction than the main levels and the first expa
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KAMI 2 will let you create your own origami puzzles in 2017
State of Play is known for creating videogames out of physical materials. Their biggest to date is Lumino City (2014), an adventure game set across a mechanical metropolis that the team actually constructed out of paper, card, wood, miniature lights, and motors. Outside of that are smaller titles li
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Paintings literally change the world in upcoming puzzler FRESCO
The years after Portal came out in 2007 were tiring. An influx of first-person puzzle games broke like a tidal wave over the horizon. All of them flaunting what their creators deemed to be the next big “mind-bending” idea. They simply hoped to wow people. But many of these games were were dull, unin
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SHENZEN I/O is here to make you code like it’s the 1980s
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. SHENZEN I/O (Windows, Mac) BY ZACHTRONICS Some games and educational apps try to ease you into the art of writing code. SHENZEN I/O isn’t so soft. It’s a throwback to the 1980s, when there was
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Balthazar’s Dream reveals what good boys dream of, and it’s ruff
A soft whimper causes you to look up from your work. It’s your dog, who is sleeping peacefully in bed. Is she dreaming? Her legs twitch slightly. Maybe she’s running around in a field, chasing a squirrel. She’s too old to do that now, but you like to think that the tiny mammal stood no chance in the
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Pavilion gets eye-tracking support to better support disabled players
Visiontrick Media has revealed that its “fourth-person” puzzle adventure Pavilion is getting eye-tracking controls. The studio teamed up with eye-tracking specialist company Tobii to develop a way for the game to be played solely with your gaze—no keyboard or mouse needed. This is, obviously, a big
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Barnaque’s next game is about the burden of being hopeful
Barnaque is one of the most interesting freeware game studios to have emerged in the past few years. Comprised of the Montreal-based duo David Martin and Émeric Morin, Barnaque has made games that are often described as “batshit crazy” and “psychedelic,” mostly because the pair want to mess with pla