Runnink out of Space
Word-based puzzle adventure
Story
It is the year 20XX.
Space (the black stuff in the sky) is limited! We need to get more ink to make more Space. Unfortunately, the only way to gather enough ink is to milk a Giant Deep-Space Cuttlefiship.
GDSC's envelop themselves in a protective puzzling labyrinth - a human would go mad in such a labyrinth. Instead, we are sending you, a PLYR robot with a unique ability – to forget very easily. Your memory is very limited. Not because we built you cheaply or anything.
Gameplay
The gameplay consists of exploring rooms, answering riddles, and transforming words, while managing a growing inventory of known world and words. Interact with the world by clicking on the game screen – an exclamation mark near the cursor indicates a possible interaction. During dialogues, you will encounter three special kinds of bubbles:
- "Take word" (green bubble) – your goal is to guess what the answer to the riddle given in the preceding text is. Use the keyboard to answer. If you answer correctly, you will be able to take the word into your memory.
- "Give word" (yellow bubble) – once again, your goal is to guess what the answer is, but this time you need to have the word in your inventory and drag and drop it over the bubble to answer.
- "Modify word" (blue bubble) – the flavour text indicates what kind of word modification you can do here. Drag and drop words from your inventory onto the bubble to transform them.
Controls
- mouse to interact and move
- double-click to warp when moving
- keyboard to type when needed
- Q to start
Comments (3)
It's great. Looks good, nice music, clever mechanics and puzzles.
I'm amazed by how polished it is, doesn't feel like a jam game just seems like a fully designed and produced game. Skipping animations was good.
I honestly struggle to criticise. There were a couple of animations which didn't seem to speed up but other than that seemed to work great. You could maybe add in-game hints to some of the word guesses but other than that can't think of anything to add.
Awesome game! There is an awesome amount of polish going on here. From animations to sounds to screen fading effects! All of that in a short amount of time, I am amazed! Unfotrunately I am super bad at puzzle games, so I didn't get very far.
The music is also great and having a full blown conversational system is awesome and a lot of work (mechanics AND content).
Great job, keep up the good work!
Guys, I love this game. I haven't quite finished it yet but I'm excited about picking it up again.
The presentation is incredibly swish. It's also nice that you can skip animations when you really get into the flow of the game. Overall it's impressively polished.
The mechanics are very well designed. I particularly like how the robot's memory works, which is simple but interestingly effective. After a while I had to note down things like which words I could create, and the means available to transform them—but I think this is also really neat, as it was commonplace in, say, the 90s to do so.
The difficulty is decent: I had to think about the problems but haven't yet felt like I'm hitting a brick wall. The humour is great too, which makes me want to keep playing.
I noticed a very minor bug: sometimes when you double-click to enter a new room, the old room flashes up again (maybe it replays the animation more than it should?). This might have been caused by me passing too quickly between multiple rooms.
Another bug I hit was that my browser (Chromium) started to use up more and more CPU time while the game was open. It's not really a strong criticism though, as I notice this with a lot of browser games (I'm looking at you, Phaser…).
Overall, if I were able to rate this game, I'd give it a juicy 9/10 or so. It could probably go on Itch or something similar as-is, too.