If that’s a bicycle in interstellar space, I should pay more attention to the X-Games.
Bertogames’ Sky Scramble is a simple spatial-relations
puzzler. Simple — except that solving the puzzles often isn’t simple,
and while the presentation is spatial, the reasoning I found myself
using was more abstract. Maybe not as simple as advertised, then.
It came as no surprise when I discovered that the game was designed
by two mathematicians. Sky Scramble is the only puzzle game I’ve
encountered which doesn’t much rely on spatial, linguistic, or
arithmetic reasoning, which makes it interesting both for fans of
puzzles and for those who generally avoid the genre because of the
limited variety of abilities in use.
Spin Out
A digression: when I was a child, I bought a physical puzzle called Spin Out in a museum gift shop on a class trip (I was gifted enough to pay attention to products marketed at gifted children, but not gifted enough to recognize that even the gifted could be suckers). It was sort of a disappointment, at first because it felt like I could fiddle with it forever and not make any progress, and then later because there was just one trick to it. The right pattern was extremely easy to follow if you understood it, but constantly led you into falsely thinking you were essentially back where you started if you didn’t, because you wouldn’t recognize the importance of one small difference.
If you must insert gratuitous heavenly bodies in your game, I like this method.
I wish I were a better mathematician so that I could describe Sky Scramble more precisely. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a special case of some interesting work in Graph Theory or something, with a theme no more accurately modeled by it than you’d expect from a badly-written word problem (but which serves as their excuse to include cool space photos). Then again, perhaps it’s best that I can’t deny you the opportunity to stretch your brain to encompass these puzzles more thoroughly than I quite have.
SCORE
