She Remembered Caterpillars

She Remembered Caterpillars is a systems-based puzzle game involving color addition and subtraction. Players must adapt the colors of small creatures to match different bridges and gateways, eventually guiding them to exit points. Hand-drawn art and a moving story about loss add richness to this short but engrossing game.

Each level features one or more creatures of different colors, called “Gammies”, who need to be moved along pathways to specific exit platforms. The game is viewed from a top-down perspective; you control the Gammies one by one, clicking on the location you wish them to go to. The level pathways contain colored bridges and gateways. Creatures can cross same-colored bridges, but they cannot move through same-colored gateways.

The puzzle complexity stems from the ability to change and combine the colors on a Gammie. Both creatures and obstacles follow elementary laws of color mixing. For example, adding red to a blue Gammie turns them purple, which can cross red and purple bridges in addition to the blue ones, but cannot pass through gateways of those three colors. Machines that dispense or remove a particular color are located at specific points, so solving the puzzles is all about crossing bridges and swapping colors in the right order so that everyone ends up in the right place with the colors they need.

The hand-drawn art and animations provide a lot of charm. Each color of creature and obstacle is associated with a distinct shape, ensuring that the game is accessible to colorblind players. While the Gammies look cute and cartoony, the elaborately detailed environments are ambiguously fungal-looking, making the game cozy and lightly unsettling at the same time.

She Remembered Caterpillars also features a refined and touching story. Told through very brief text vignettes between levels, it follows a woman struggling to make end-of-life choices for her dying father. The writing is candid and delicate, with openly emotional overtones. It could stick with you well beyond your expectations for a color-matching puzzle game.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz and edited by Oriane Tury.