https://thinkycollective.itch.io/blast-one-standing
For this week’s critical play, I played the game Blast One Standing. This game is for the computer and developed by members of the Thinky Puzzle Games Discord server. It was developed for people who like to play puzzle games online. The mechanics of the game are simple but the dynamics can be very complex as the player tries to figure how to solve the puzzle leading to the aesthetics of challenge and submission. The objective of the game is to just leave one block standing. The player can push around certain blocks to chain them together and explode them. However, the initial configurations of the blocks create obstacles leading to the dynamics of the player thinking about the way to solve the puzzle. The simple mechanics, graphics, controls, and rules of the game deceptively influenced the level of difficulty that can be achieved. The player can only move up, left, right, down. Blocks cannot touch other blocks while pushing them or they will combine which usually happens when the player doesn’t want it to. This adds to the puzzle of trying to figure out how to push the blocks into the corrects places on top of where the blocks should go in the first place. As the game progresses, new mechanics are added with new blocks with different functionality. For example, the blue blocks can only start explosions and the green blocks only continue explosion lines. This makes the puzzle more complex as more mechanics create a more complex dynamic of solving. Another mechanic is the initial configuration of the blocks to set up the puzzle. Sometimes the blocks are immovable like boundaries which limit the player movement. This gives a constraint to the solving dynamic which can make it easier or harder depending on how the player is thinking. This game was a fun puzzle game and I liked the mechanic to control a block to move around instead of just solving a puzzle in the player’s mind. To improve this game, I would add more onboarding directions at the beginning because it was confusing to see how the game worked. Once I got it, it was exciting to move around the board and solve the puzzle.
