purple is a mobile puzzle game created by Bart Bonte, and available for iOS and Android, which I played on. It’s a simple game that is definitely targeted towards casual audiences, though probably best enjoyed audiences who would have the spatial awareness to understand the puzzles in the game. The game is simple: fill the screen with purple. With each screen, there are different puzzles that inform just how the player is able to fulfill that task. purple’s use of differing mechanics to create different puzzles all with a shared goal serves to instill a sense of exploration that transforms each level’s objective from solving a fixed puzzle into the discovery of the rules of the puzzle themselves, rewarding the player’s intuition as much as their problem-solving skills.
The game immediately tells the player what the goal of the game is even without introducing any gameplay elements: the intro of the game starts in black and then injects color within itself for its title screen. I believe this screen is intentionally signaling to the player that this transition of color will be the guiding principle throughout the game. As such, the game does not need to give any instructions to the player, as they already have an understanding of what needs to happen, even without knowing the boundaries of the game.
The first few puzzles act on this assumption, presenting the player with nothing but a clearly interactable element of the game. The player is guided towards interacting with that element, in which they will see the screen transition to one filled with color. Each of these levels has a different mechanic that it utilizes: one level requires you to press a button, some require you to swipe, and one level requires you to press and hold. However, these all act mechanically similar, they tell the player that they need to figure out what part of the level they can manipulate to make the screen purple. This dynamic creates an aesthetic of Fun as Challenge, as players are motivated by overcoming the obstacles imposed to them by the level design, similar to the fun created by games like World’s Hardest Game and the Run series – but instead does this with a puzzle format. Based on the Bates reading, these puzzles work so well as introductory puzzles because of the elements’ proximity to the user. In these puzzles, the player pretty quickly finds what they need to interact with because it is placed right in front of them, in a way that they would likely find out by tapping the screen. Bonte places these puzzles at the beginning of the game to approachably introduce the loop of discovering the boundaries of that level and using it to solve the puzzle and advance, similar to a game like Factory Balls.
As the game continues, however, Bonte increases the difficulty by making the mechanics of the levels less obvious. These levels are kept engaging by employing what the Designer’s Notebook would define as architectural Constraint: the boundaries of each level are set up by the goal previously communicated to the player, ‘fill in the black space.’ The game employs the same strategy as platformers like Mario in this regard: the goal works with the architectural constraints of the level to direct the player towards a specific set of actions. In the context of purple, the architecture of each level is created by the use of the color scheme, which guides players as to what they should do. However, these harder levels, while clear in goal, are not clear in how the player should solve them. These puzzles are all more involved, requiring the player to interact with all aspects of the level, and figure out what elements of the levels are interactable, and how they can manipulate those elements to make the screen purple.
These puzzles reward the player’s intuition as to what would create a solution for the puzzle, as well as for actually solving the puzzle. Because Bonte designed the game to make clear what the objective of each level is, the changing mechanics still play into the same dynamic initially established within the player. However, in this case while it creates a sense of Challenge, it also instills an aesthetic of Fun as Discovery. This is because the player is incentivized to discover how to overcome the problem at hand as well as solving said problem. The Bates reading would argue that these puzzles work to create this Discovery because they all amplify the theme of the game. Each level, each instance of breakthrough, further builds into the pattern established by the game, which, in turn, fuels the player’s exploration and willingness to look further outside the box, which makes them enjoy this type of puzzle game even more.
Overall, Bonte uses the color scheme of the game as a North Star that constantly creates a guide and a motivation for the player to continue being creative with ways to solve the puzzles. Furthermore, the game’s use of differing mechanics for those puzzles produces even more enjoyment for the player, challenging the way they would usually approach and experience a puzzle and instead encouraging the player to confront the boundaries of the puzzle itself.
Ethically, purple assumes an understanding of certain conventions in order to understand how to solve its puzzles. These conventions include that of a mobile interface, as well as gaming conventions: the game assumes you know that swiping or holding down on a button are ways that you can interact with the world without having to tell the player outright. The game’s minimalism makes it globally accessible to players who speak a language other than English, as well as only requiring a player to understand a mobile interface works. However, the game excludes those who are not tech-literate and might struggle to understand that you can swipe something that doesn’t explicitly say ‘drag your finger across the screen.’ The game is inherently exclusionary to those with certain types of color deficiency or blindness as well, since the game is predicated on distinguishing between purple and the background color. As a colorblind person, I did not struggle to play this game, but if the color scheme was instead colors I struggled more with differentiating I would be excluded from the game even if the mechanics were the exact same.
