Glitchspace

Novel first-person puzzler with programming mechanics. It's free, so if you like the look of the video, check it out!

[h1]An intriguing (and free!) programming puzzler.[/h1] At its core, Glitchspace is a straightforward first person platformer that requires moving cuboids and platforms to progress from one level to the next, but the thing that makes it stand out is how you go about doing so. Rather than relying on precision shooting ala Portal or accurate jumping and timing in a more conventional sense, you instead have to create actions for certain cuboids using relatively basic visual programming logic. This means if you want to rotate something 90 degrees, you set up the command to do that via an interface for each object you can manipulate. This is where the idea starts to get more interesting as deeper degrees of logic are required to get the desired outcome. Things like collision detection, true/false statements to determine whether certain branches function or not, and simple mathematics to further scale things like moving cuboids, stretching them out, or increasing their force applied when colliding with something all combine to help you traverse each section. Each flowchart then starts to take shape and grow in complexity depending on the requirement for the level. The experience itsel…

I love so much about the game, but it's buggy, lacks polish, and very badly needs good tutorial elements for each section that explain how to use all the new abilities you get. I'm almost four hours in and still have no idea how a lot of things work. I loved the first hour or so, but it just kept getting more and more frustrating as time went on as new problems kept cropping up.

For a free game, it's pretty neat. I like the concept. If it got fleshed out some more and maybe had a little more world built around it so it didn't feel so much like a tech demo, I could see it being worth a little money. Definitely needs some less ear piercing audio. Also, the UI went off the screen on my ultra-wide, but I get that those monitors are rare.

Awesome vibe for the puzzle game

"Glitchspace" is another Portal/Q.U.B.E like first person puzzler from Itchio, but this one has you doing trite little Node.red style mini programming puzzles to solve the various puzzles you're set up against. What do you do in the game? It's a first person puzzler, so you're dropped into a minimalist low poly environment (it kinda looks like how they envisaged the internet would like in 2026 back in 1995, and let me tell you, 1995 was wrong about the internet) and discover you can't go anywhere without solving puzzles. This involves bringing up a little 2D graphical programming interface and dragging and dropping around different objects, evaluators/operators to make a little "programming circuit" that changes the world around you and lets you plod on to the next puzzle. And I do mean plod... you can't run, you can only step around in a painfully slow manner. That brings up one of the bigger issues with this beyond the visuals... the game itself really lacks polish and the puzzles don't really engage well. I'd rather play Portal again and try to remember how to do those puzzles than plod through this one. This is another case of Itch failing the one single job it has... t…