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Shuzzle Brings Shadowy Twist To Puzzle Games
Lewey Geselowitz writes "A lot of games nowadays have stencil shadows, but they are very rarely there for any reason other than just to look cool. So I wrote Shuzzle, a 3D block puzzle game for Windows where you can't see the objects, only their shadows. This forces the player to conceptually imagine the board and pieces, because they are not given the normal 'crutch' of being able to see them, only their projection from the light. It adds a whole new dimension to the standard 'soma' game and promotes a new form of thought which you cannot find in the physical world. I believe this uses more of the potential of shadows, and I'm looking forward to how they are used in the future, bringing new forms of gameplay, not just pretty pictures. [These are from the same developer who created Quake 2 AbSIRD (a Quake 2 Magic-Eye mod) and Freed Go (Go on a Mobius strip), both previously featured on Slashdot Games.]"
How are these games "freed from constraints" when only new constraints are introduced? Now if you had tetris with true physics in 3D and sub-"square" movement, that might be "freeing from constraints" :)
I wonder how much fun these games actually are (can't test here) but I doubt they're anything better than a 2-minute novelty.
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I'd like to second the comments made here - while it's an interesting concept, the entire game is severely crippled by the poor controls. I would much rather see a system where you select a shape and then can use keyboard controls or rotation selections from a palette to manipulate that one shape. Make the shadow of the selected shape a different color (if possible) to indicate which shape is selected.
Also, make camera panning a special mode that you have to activate separately, so that you don't sit there whirling about while you're trying to click on a shape.