PEGBRJE: WitchWay and ISLANDS
Let the puzzles and artistry begin.
WitchWay is a pixel platforming puzzler by Andrew Gleeson, along with Henri Rochefort, Niilo Takalainen, and Nathan Antony. Set in at the bottom of a rather massive well, you play as the cute little witch herself as she attempts to scale to the top and escape with her strong arms to push boxes and ability to possess certain boxes to move them. This then spirals into boxes controlling lasers, boxes pushing buttons, and boxes revealing bunny rabbits to collect. Unfortunately for me, puzzle games are not my strong suit so many bunnies were not rescued in my attempts to find a way to maneuver the boxes so I could reach them.
WitchWay keeps itself simple, yet opens up into quite the interwoven world once your wand is located and mechanics are learned and gathered. Doors are never fully closed, so returning to old locations is common to search for ways that might’ve been missed. Many pathways redirect back to the central chamber, as your only way up to the next ‘floor’ is by the large bucket that can be directed upwards after the requirements are met such as keys. Seeing familiar areas from a different height or location is commonplace as you seek to find everything you can before continuing upwards to freedom. While this does lead to a little bit of deja vu at times (I got lost ok), every area does feature a handy map inscribed on the wall to give an inkling of which chamber our little witch currently resides in. Chambers with bunnies even have signs to help players understand whether or not searching extensively will wield results in rescued rabbits.
If it sounds like I don’t have much to say, it’s primarily due to the fact that puzzle games are slightly out of my element. They often cause extreme frustration in players such as myself at the simplest of things, yet I didn’t run into many puzzles I didn’t feel were ‘unsolvable’. Mechanics were introduced at a comfortable pace, including orbs that could extend your cast range and spider webs that you could stand on or burn with the previously mentioned laser beams. WitchWay constantly challenges you to look at the given blocks in multiple ways, as a laser director block was still able to carry you to a different place and then redirect a laser. It gave for a lot of different techniques such as stacking blocks to block the laser direction so I could get higher, and then push the blocker out of the way.
I don’t believe it to be very long: it’s advertised at about 2–3 hours, which for me is about 4–6 hours. If you like rescuing bunnies and block-based puzzles, give WitchWay a try and see if you can escape the well with as many rabbits possible. It’s cute and doesn’t have any form of timers that I’m aware of, so WitchWay can be as casual as you want it to be. Hopefully you can pull more rabbits out of your hat than I could.
ISLANDS: Non-Places is an interactive experience by Carl Burton, an artist and developer. To explain ISLANDS is a bit tricky, as it isn’t a game in the traditional sense of the term. It’s entirely about recreating average and every day places in the world and mystifying them whilst remaining faithful to the location itself. You rotate the location in place as you see it from different angles and different lightings, and the world around the location plays out before you. There is only one mechanic: when the scene stops ‘moving’, click on glowing objects that give audio feedback to continue the experience. To give an example, eggs got off of a bus and filed into the bus stop, only for it to appear like an incubator as the lighting changed colour. Even then, I cannot objectively state that this is what happened, because that’s what I was able to interpret from watching the scene unfold, and its there that the point of the game is made clear. Reimagining the mundane.
It’s completely built by the sound design, which I wasn’t expecting to be so impactful. At the beginning of every set piece is the feeling of normalcy, giving an atmosphere and ambience to what is essentially a singular object. A fountain had people walking around it, the sound of ceiling fans slowly rotating and humming. The bus stop had traffic driving that didn’t exist. Adding to an atmosphere that doesn’t technically exist, so when the scene alters into something bizarre it doesn’t even feel all that out of place. The birds chirping at a bus stop are understandable and lifelike, even when they seemingly come out of the bus in egg form with bird cages visible within the bus.
This game feels more like an interactive experiment than a game — it takes preconceived notions of set pieces and dares you to look at them in different lights. I shouldn’t go into more detail for fear of accidentally influencing the possibilities of what you might see while playing, so instead I’ll just mention that this barely takes under an hour. Give it a whirl if you’re looking for some hallucinogenic and experimental ways to look at an escalator.
Links to both games below.
