The latest edition of Ludum Dare, the hugely popular 2-3 day game jam, took place earlier this month and the results were announced over the weekend. There’s always some tremendously creative games made for it, so it’s well worth paying attention to.
Developers were asked to create games with the theme "Limited Space". I won’t pretend that this is an exhaustive list (over 2000 games were submitted), but here’s twelve thinky games that I particularly enjoyed!
Stretchmancer
Stretch the world to break out of space prison. Delightfully silly vibes and plot. (Winner: Jam)
Hope Falters
Play Hope Falters
by Jeremy Ryan
Rush Hour meets Scrabble. I found a couple of levels to be a bit brute-forcey, but the idea works well. (Winner: Compo)
CERT
A charming set of paper puzzles. Structurally interesting - takes some inspiration from choose-your-own-adventure books.
Terminal Noise
Play Terminal Noise
by Fusionnist
Cryptic to a fault, but rewarding if you can get past that and tap into the feeling of confusion becoming understanding.
QPCA-77B
Play QPCA-77B
by Dashing Strike
A neat programming game. Given the theme, you might think that the primary challenge is fitting your code into a small number of lines, but in fact the tricky part is working around the unusual instruction set and computation model.
Stingy Seating
Play Stingy Seating
by Steven Miller
Help the passengers get on the bus to their destination - but it only has two seats. There’s some good puzzles, but what made me really smile was the new mechanic added partway in.
World Weaver
Weave the fabric of the universe to change the world. I love the way that you explore the levels - it feels very natural but also novel. Note that it’s not a pure puzzle game - it has some combat - but I never died so it seemed fairly forgiving.
Bit Golf
Ever wanted to be a text compression algorithm? It’s very satisfying to step-by-step see the file size decreasing, although I wouldn’t recommend trying to achieve maximum compression in most levels.
Clearing Space
Play Clearing Space
by Sévan
Destroy parts of the level to make it solvable. I liked this two-stage process of first figuring out what blocks need to be destroyed, and then actually doing the sokoban part.
Micromachines
Play Micromachines
by Holy Black Cat
Construct tiny machines to push and poke things into place. The UI isn’t great but I enjoyed it once I figured out what I was doing.
Hazel & Hector
Play Hazel & Hector
by cassowary
Control two rabbits as they coordinate to eat all the grass. It reminds me of a less abstract Inner Tao - a good reminder of the power of theme.
Picky Plants
A pleasant plant-placing pastime. I’ve seen a lot of object-placement games and this one isn’t doing anything too novel, but it’s nice to see the different plant types they came up with and how they affect each other.
Thanks to tjm for pointing me towards some of these.
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