SquishCraft

SquishCraft is an abstract block-pushing puzzle game where you play as a block with a man’s face on it, trying to reach a checkered flag. The game gets its name from the ability to squish blocks together and merge them into combined blocks. Don’t be fooled by the game’s unserious art style — the challenges it creates are tightly designed, extremely difficult, and often shocking in just how far they bend the traditional rules of block-pushing puzzle games.

To beat a level of SquishCraft, you must reach the checkered flag with your character, a white block with the face of (as per the developer’s own words) “some random guy.” Each level has obstacles blocking you from reaching the flag, like a block that moves out of the way only when a button is pressed, or a grinning spike block, or a block with a crude drawing of a catgirl. To surpass these obstacles and reach the flag, you take advantage of your ability to squish two (or more!) blocks into each other, creating a merged block from the two original blocks, with each part half as large as it was originally.

This block-squishing ability has countless uses which the game explores in depth, and many of which require you to exploit unexpected consequences of the game’s radically strange rules. The weirdness of Squishcraft’s core mechanics as well as its steep learning curve make it an extremely challenging, yet often rewarding, test of spatial reasoning.

SquishCraft isn’t meant to appeal to anyone who doesn’t already love puzzles, as it has no story, no hints, and crude, borderline antagonistic graphics. It also includes level editing capabilities, although they’re somewhat rudimentary, and player-created levels must be shared as files outside the game.

This description was written by Asher Stone.