This Scottish first-person puzzler is now in paid alpha
I really like the idea of glitches as a form of artistic exprestion, especially in videogames. Whether it’s the opening of Fez or the memory glitches in Remember Me, there’s something about our supposedly perfect digital universes breaking in intriguing ways that’s really interesting to me. Scottish indie studio Space Budgie is putting glitches at the heart of its first-person puzzle game Glitchspace which is currently in paid alpha.
Players have to navigate a series of stark virtual-reality levels where the geometry can be manipulated in the same ways you would if you were a programmer. A simple platform has variables, like its scale, vector, and its collision, all of which can be altered by the player to proceed. All of this is done via an interface which drops controls onto a flat pane that can be linked together.
The game’s still rough around the edges as you would expect and some more explanation of some of the terms would be welcome (especially for programming-averse fools like myself) but Glitchspace has the right mix of an eye-catching aesthetic and a unique gameplay hook to keep me interested in seeing a final product.