PEGBRJE: Beglitched and The Space Between
One game of finding unknown things in unknown spaces and one of exploring what unknown spaces are. Poetry, I know.
Beglitched is a match 3 strategy action-esque game made by Hexecutable, a duo dev team of developers @q_dork & @bad_tetris. You play as ‘The Stranger’, a person who has stumbled across the Glitch Witch’s old computer where they have tasked you with taking over for their position as the GW while they are gone. Where they are gone, who knows — all you know is that hackers and other bad guys are still navigating through networks and doing bad stuff to them, and you need to stop them as the Glitch Witch. While this is a very irresponsible way to transfer power, it is an effective way of establishing that the player has a job to do and needs to learn quickly, especially with a vengeful elephant attacking instantly.
Gameplay in Beglitched is split into two different aspects, both equally puzzling (in a good way). Let’s start with exploration, which is a cute representation of surfing a network via a cat avatar. To secure the area, you must find a specific amount of ‘bun buns’ that are stored on computers within the network by logging into them. The puzzle, however, is that the computers do not show what is on them, rather they show what is on the connected computers instead, similar to Minesweeper in a way. The difficulty of exploration begins to scale as the number of computers connected to each other begins to grow, and the ‘scrambled’ computers can cause the entire network to randomize and reset, effectively restarting your progress. There are also the enemy elephants that need to be dealt with littering the networks, and knowing when to take them on while exploring the networks is key to ensuring that you can find everything you can before engaging.
The attack on the hackers, or hack attack as I fondly call them, is done in a similar style to the exploration: both utilizing spacing puzzles to locate and solve. The hack attacks, however, are done in a hybrid of match 3 meeting Battleship. The enemy is hidden on the match 3 board, and it is up to you to locate them via trial and error while matching icons to move the enemy while looking for them. The goal is to have the hacker on or near an explosive square while keeping your cycles and energy full via matching those squares. Running out of energy means you cannot make actions, and running out of cycles means the hacker can attack. Location is done by clicking on certain squares that give a compass-esque hint, either by pointing in the direction of the hacker or giving a few positions that they could be in. This game of cat and mouse continues until either you run out of hearts or you locate them and blow up their tile, signified by a lovely ‘doof!’.
This combination of puzzles is what makes Beglitched such an interesting game. I’ve always been of the opinion that Match 3 titles work best when given a complimentary mechanic or system, as a naked Match 3 game feels underwhelming and loses its excitement. By including a cutesy aesthetic, bizarre storyline and interesting exploration system, Beglitched wants you to explore and find out what is going on in its world of networked hackers while also solving some interesting Match 3 puzzles. In a way, this game can be played as a lazy Sunday afternoon puzzle solver, or as a more active title to discover the secrets within. This duality is what makes Beglitched special, and if you are looking for a cute hacking game with Match 3/Battleship ‘combat’, give it a chance.
The Space Between is a surreal visual experience made by solo dev Christoph, an audiovisual artist and composer. You experience a moment in time for the life of Martin, an architect, as he meets a lady named Clara and while they explore the theater he designed begins to unravel an experience about what it means to have closeness and separation. There are no mechanics, no systems that are needed to experience this, only to walk and read the text as the world begins to bend and break during their exploration of a concept.
This is another game that took me quite a while into the playthrough to fully understand — it’s concepts aren’t entirely groundbreaking, yet due to the presentation style and surrealism I found it hard to follow. The theming focuses primarily on the contrasting ideas of how things can be so close yet so separate, using a curtain as its medium to fully delve into its ideas. Martin constantly repeats the simple phrase that ‘sometimes walls don’t have to be made of matter’, an idea that is constantly pulled apart in this short adventure. The philosophical nature of this game is what makes it so open to interpretation, and also so hard to follow at the same time. If the concepts don’t fully take root in your brain, the game becomes hard to follow. After doing some research, the article linked below has 4 parts that breaks down the significance of its themings better than I ever could, and is worth the read if you wish to explore this idea further.
Thankfully for The Space Between, this philosophical journey is accompanied by the most atmospherically terrifying soundtrack I’ve heard in quite some time. Christoph utilizes the PS1 aesthetic to its fullest potential; since the graphical fidelity is so low, it forces players to use sound as a pillar of their understanding of their surroundings. It combines the almost dissonant whispers of singular notes floating on air with synths to give a dead yet open feeling that actively kept me chilled, and it got worse when the soundtrack decided to just vanish. The times where there was absolutely no sound other than my own foot steps made me fear for a jump scare at every turn, creating tension in the simplest of actions no matter where I went. Because of this, the ending I believe was unintentionally a massive jump scare for me. I know I’m easily scared, but the atmosphere just kept everything primed for horror when none was really inferred.
The Space Between is a bizarre title. It only takes 50 minutes, but cannot be played in sections; it needs to be played all at once to truly get the effect that was intended. The translations were a little shakey at times, but the ideas and concepts still got across. It made me question a lot of things that it may have never truly intended, such as the fear of regret for not getting closer to people or what occurs when trust cannot be established. I don’t have any of the answers, and neither does the game. It only begs you to ask and learn for yourself.
Links are below.
