Konkan Coast Pirate Solutions, a route-planning puzzle game about guiding pirate ships on their pirating adventures, releases simultaneously with Alephant today as part of our Thinkathon extravaganza. Konkan Coast is an excellent example of things to come from the recipients of Draknek’s New Voices grant for up-and-coming thinky developers.
Each puzzle in Konkan Coast challenges you to guide a number of ships to their respective targets on a gridded sea: black-sailed ships must anchor at ports, while white-gold merchant ships must be directed towards gold coins. To do so, you are given a fixed set of command tokens — turn left, turn right, stop, etc. — which you'll place on the map before hitting play to see what happens. Will your ships sail gracefully to their goals, or collide in a catastrophic mess? Throughout the tutorial puzzles, you’ll discover unique aspects of the mechanics that add a fascinating dynamic layer to the puzzles.
All this buccaneering takes place in the office of a tech startup prototyping their pirating simulation technology to pitch to real life pirates. Silicon Galley, if you will… (sorry). You take on the role of newly-appointed CEO, Swami, tasked with moving your ambitious technology along its product roadmap one puzzle at a time. Each section of the game is capped off by entertaining conversations with your teammates as they scramble to get their pitch ready for your eye-patched investors.
As these kinds of set-up-and-play games require you to visualize what will happen once you hit play, there’s always a worry that keeping track of all possible outcomes will become too much to hold in one’s head. Thankfully, Konkan Coast recognizes this, providing a pleasant and gentle difficulty curve, with each level exploring a simple, interesting idea. In fact, the most inscrutable configurations are presented not as puzzles but as little preset toys to play with — a very smart way to explore those complex emergent behaviors without overwhelming the player.
With its focused, snappy puzzles, each rewarding you with a mesmerizing dance as your ships narrowly avoid each other, this game is a real joy to play. For those of you ready to hoist the sails, you’ll find Konkan Coast Pirate Solutions is available on Steam today. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the Thinkathon games releasing this week and subscribe to the giveaway for the chance to win a free copy of the remaining games.
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