Puzzle platformers have come a long way. Long progressed from the mere idea of just jumping they now screw with the fundamentals of physics; time and space. Closure – a contender in this years IGF – messes around with light in a way that completely obliterates my conception of space. That is to say it’s hard.
The basic premise is that what you can see exists, what you can’t doesn’t. And this is in a literal sense, none of this philosophical nonsense and questions of perception here. Can’t see the floor? You fall through it. Can’t see a wall? You can pass through it. Each 2D level is pitch black apart from the outline of yourself and what is visible from light cast by little balls. Most balls can be picked up and placed down, and each level is simply a task of doing this to carve a path from one side of the screen to the other. It’s like you have to evaluate the level in absolute real time and then at each moment forget what you already know about that level because it’s no longer relevant, but then you can’t do that entirely because you’ll become stuck. Basically it’s a mind fuck but remarkably clever.
In all honesty I haven’t got at all far with Closure, because it was too dam hard and I’m stupidly incompetent and impatient. The concept is solid though and it’s very pretty in an arty way – plus it has that lovely indie overtone of making you think about reality (well it did me when writing this anyway), which is just the sort of game wankery (TM) that all us elitist pc gamers love. I’m not sure that it will win IGF (I would have said the same about Blueberry Garden though) but it’s certainly worth you checking the hell out.
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