Ever play Crack the Whip? Get a bunch of people to hold hands in a line. The goal of one person at one end of the line is to push, pull, drag, and yank the rest of the people around, and to get someone to lose hold of their neighbor's hand. It's good fun; the most fun you can have breaking your arm, really. Not that we've experimented with different methods or anything.
Consider then, the case of Gen, a physics game with the same whippy slingshotty action. Your goal is to bring all the yellow cells to the blue goal blob, without hitting the red barriers. What makes this tricky is the way you move the cells along. Click the mouse to turn your green controller cell yellow, and any yellow cell within a certain distance will be attracted to it like a magnet. Clicking again removes the attractive force, but a cell's momentum is maintained. Remember, if you move your mouse away from a group of attracted cells too quickly, you might lose control of them.
Along the game's 20 levels, you'll have to find your way around red blobs which instantly kill off your cells, as well as movable barriers, green forms that repel your yellow cells, and other obstacles. You'll often have to plan your moves ahead of time, so as not to accidentally drag one group of cells into a barrier while trying to manipulate another one. Twenty levels doesn't sound like very many, but the increasing difficulty will keep you swimming around in the petri dish for a while.
From Eugene Karataev, creator of Splitter. Art by Alexey Egoshin.
Thanks to Ryan for sending this one in!
How to
disconnect the ropes?
sirgen:
one click to attract/attach ropes, another click to turn the ropes off
any help on level 11?
interesting, but i'm stuck on level 14. as for the ropes,
the only way i see is to run a piece into the red, breaking the ropes connected to it
Level 14's got me hung up, too.
I'm stuck on 14 too. This got a little harder than I thought it would.
haven't quite managed 14, but i think i might know how to do it
if you can manage to grab one block and not the other, drag it as quickly as possible into the repelling blobs - making sure you don't lose contact with them - and you fly straight through, hopefully keeping losses to a minimum
let me know if you have any success
figured out 14, finished game, too short, i would've liked more levels, but really good nonetheless.
as for 14
brute force did it for me, just move the squares, one at a time, as fast as possible, straight at, and through the repellers. i actually managed to get the required fifteen using just the big square
stuck on 15 now!
I managed 14. But level 15 is where I realized that this game is too frustrating to be any fun.
Thumbs down for me.
15 is probably the most annoying thing I've ever done in correlation with a game featured by JIG. Eugene Karataev can sizzle in a fiery doom of red globs.
Egad, 19 looks impossible.
Help?
There must be something I don't understand about level 13 "magnexit." I can't get more than 5 in there.
Level 19 hint:
Take your time.
Even more specific Level 19 hint:
After you grab the two down below, you need to take all the rest verrrrrrry slooooooowly and thread them through the little obstacle course. If you stand right next to each repeller you can keep them just controlled enough to stop them bursting on the walls.
For those having trouble with the antimagnets,
it's all about momentum. If you sling the spheres toward the antimagnet, it's going to rocket them back in the opposite direction (or sling them around, depending on the trajectory). Thus, if you move slowly and carefully, the spheres will just kind of roll along the "antimagnetic field," as it were.
Briguy,
Look carefully, and you'll notice that the goal sphere is pulsing to a slow and steady rhythm. You'll do best to get the spheres to the goal when it's dim.
In my opinion, there was absolutely no reason to know that, since it doesn't affect any other levels. Not a great level, gameplay-wise.
Oh, and I can't pretend like I beat the game without a little help on a couple of levels. I found a great walkthrough on another site, which I didn't think very nice to repost here without permission.
How do you get past level 13.
Evidently, somebody else didn't think it was very nice for me to provide a link to the blog with the walkthrough I used, since they removed it from my comment.
Oh, well. Just Google it, I guess.
Lever 13, the magnet one
for level 13, I just flung the spheres against the goal, building up momentum until they broke through the magnetic field sort of thing
Finally got level 15. Here ya go:
you have to turn the rectangle to where it is in a vertical position. I did this by pulling the bottom left corner down a little first, the grabbing the bottom right corner before it touches the red spots. After it's vertical, grab the new bottom right corner and slowly drag it into the cell, carefully making sure that the top left corner doesn't catch on the green cell. When you get all four from the bottom right, then take the bottom left corner and bring it in. After that allow the remaining corners to lie flat, then pull them in individually. Glad I could help!
Update