Glitchspace is an upcoming puzzler created by a small team of developers at Space Budgie, where the player reprograms the environment to reach their goal.
There’s something very endearing about the inherent minimalistic design featured in a lot of ‘Indie’ titles these days, most likely because it completely opposes our conception of the huge polished AAA games from the ‘Big Bad’ Corporations. To this degree Glitchspace is probably one of the most perfect examples of this, beginning the game in a very empty space – a blank canvas so to speak, but as you progress through the levels you will be given more items to interact with and increasing complexity in the challenges you face.
Glitchspace is a First Person Perspective Platforming Puzzle game, following in a similar vein to acclaimed games Portal and Antichamber. The primary mechanic of Glitchspace involves the player manipulating physical objects on screen by altering their core values and thus allowing them to completely change the nature of the object in order to progress through the stage. This is NOT your standard ‘aim, shoot and manipulate’ technique, instead the interaction with objects requires the player to engage in Logic map puzzles where you combine different values to move, transform and even break down collision effects on objects.
Progression through the game will reward the player with a plethora of variables to complete your task which include and are not limited to – Numbers, Maths, Vectors, Objects, Transformations and Logic Rules, bear in mind that double negatives will also often be a required enigma to solve.
As expected the complexity in challenges increases exponentially, however, the satisfaction in completing these challenges is well worth the time you’ve spent trying to get your head around them. What I discovered whilst playing Glitchspace is that I began using Logic techniques that I haven’t given two thoughts about since my time at College, and it’s in this that the game really excels. The application of Glitchspace could be vast and would make a fantastic educational tool, there is even a sandbox mode in addition to the standard pre-made levels which could be well implemented in user created content for challenging friends and strangers alike.
The game is currently in Alpha (v1.6) but shows a tremendous amount of promise even at this early stage, though it only took about an hour to get through there will be more added to Glitchspace during development and the prospect of user created content will determine the longevity of the project. Overall it’s a challenging, fun and rewarding experience and we can’t wait to see what the future has in store for Glitchspace!
Glitchspace is currently available here as ‘Early Access’ through Steam, however no official release date has been given yet.
