Ghosts Took My Camera is a puzzle platformer made by Vimlark, during the 8 Bits to Infinity Puzzle Jam.

You’re a ghost hunter, chasing three ghosts that keep stealing your camera. Complete platforming puzzles to catch up to the ghosts, get your camera back, and capture pictures of these ghosts.

The platforming puzzles use a combination of crates, springs, keys, locks and fans to create varied levels which slowly ramp in difficulty.

Ghosts Took My Camera is fairly well polished for a jam game. It took me about 30 minutes to play through all 12 levels. A solution video is available on the itch.io page if you get stuck. It’s available on itch.io for web and windows.

This is a game you need to experience once. Not only that, it’s a game you need to experience again. Journey is a game about piecing together a past, enduring the present, finding unexpected companionship, and, well, the journey you take along the way.

Journey is an adventure game by thatgamecompany. It was initially released on PS3 in 2012 and released on PS4 in 2019. It’s out for PC now—and I got to experience it for the first time.

Journey is beautiful, mysterious, unexpected, gripping, and jaw-dropping. It’s so beautiful, it looks like you’re playing a painting. You start in a vast desert—the sand shimmers and cloth flows with a staggering level of realism. The soundtrack is killer, and tightly fits the mood and tempo of your game.

Honestly, I think this is a game best experienced in the dark, so if skimming these screenshots convince you, stop reading now and jump in if you’re at all interested. Go in with as little detail as possible. You won’t be disappointed. (I have tried to avoid as many spoilers as possible in this article, but I share more than I knew about the game when I first experienced it.)

The figure in red

You take control of a nameless, faceless, red-robed figure in the desert. There’s no dialogue, checkpoint, or visual clue to tell you what to do—other than a tall dune with fluttering cloth off in the distance. So, you do that game thing™—move forward and walk.¹

After cresting the hill, the game cinematically guides you to experience new story beats. You first find a glowing symbol that you pick up from a strange rock, which gives you a scarf. Then, you encounter torn cloth fragments—you can’t speak, so chirping at them energizes your scarf.

The ancient glyphs round it all out in this starting area—you don’t know who you are, and you don’t know your past. There are so many questions, but you just advance onward and make it up as you go. You’ll find more glowing symbols to grow your scarf, and you’ll find more glyphs which tell you about your story.

The second figure in red

In the second area, as you’re still discovering your role in the world as this red-robed desert wanderer, a new figure appears. It’s you, but not. It’s acting with agency, seemingly doing its own thing until it takes notice of you. It runs over, and chirps—you chirp back. This is new.

To be honest, I was taken aback when I first found the other desert wanderer—I am averse to multiplayer games, and I was worried that I would ruin this person’s experience because this was my first time playing Journey, or that they would somehow be a nuisance in my gameplay. It turns out, no—they’re there to advance the story with you. The only way you can communicate is by chirping and helping. You can refill their scarf by chirping loudly, and they can refill yours. Touching each other also refills both of your scarves. It’s endearing.

What we owe to each other

You don’t know anything about the other wanderers that join you in in your adventure. But a sort of social contract exists—you’re on this journey together, and that means helping your fellow wanderer through whatever it takes. I probably was all too slow for one of the first wanderers I encountered—I wanted to explore the vast desert. Another wanderer chirped insistently at me to help me find something I missed. I took that, and helped another companion later in the game find something they missed.

I kept wondering about who I was playing with—what are they thinking about, why are they here, how much did they know about the game. And then I’m also reminded about how much that doesn’t matter, because right now I’m experiencing the story with this red robed, anonymous figure.

All this without chat, without language, and without knowing who you’re with. It’s not about you, your politics, your language, or your country.

It’s about the journey along the way.

Journey is out now for PC on the Epic Games store and is also available for PS3 and PS4. I played through journey twice²—each time taking about 2 hours— and had the soundtrack on repeat for days afterward. Go play it. Seriously.

I smash a window to alert a bot to my presence—it notices me and plots a path to my location, a dingy storage closet. The only available path I’ve given it is through flames. You see, it’s not exactly a smart bot, it’s just heeding its programming to attempt to neutralize me, the intruder. One pass through the flames isn’t enough to do it in, so I dodge it, give it a few additional thwacks with my wrench, and tease it through the fire again. The scorched bot falls to the ground, its systems permanently damaged.

The game checks off a puzzle objective: neutralize an enemy using fire.

This is High Entropy, a puzzle game by binarynonsense.

Take the elevator, please

High Entropy takes inspiration from many games, borrowing mechanics but using them in its own way to form a cohesive puzzle system.

The game takes place in a “test chamber” structure, like the seminal puzzle game, Portal. You enter a puzzle from one elevator, complete a list of objectives, and make your way to the elevator at the end of the level. You pick up keycards, master keys, and other similar knickknacks to make progress.

The game’s Fallout-style lockpicking mechanic takes the challenge and advances it another degree. You have to find bobby pins scattered throughout the level, and as a consumable resource, you only get a few attempts to access doors for different paths or items—occasionally forcing a restart if you want to 100% the level.

The game also doesn’t shy away from being inspired by immersive sims, like Deus Ex. The very first passcode to unlock a door is 0451—as is tradition. PC terminals are used to read emails and notes for the puzzles. There’s also the occasional spam email to ignore, naturally.

DOS-style command lines also form another part of the puzzle. The industrial office spaces here often have access controlled doors, security cameras, or laser trip beams securing these test chambers, and you use the PC to control them. You usually have some sort of note or tip nearby if you forget the syntax, but one-shotting a netmap followed by a telnet to disable a security system leaves you feeling like a bonafide pentester.

This game rewards exploration and discovery in the form of origami cranes. To 100% a level, you need to seek out all the hidden rooms and puzzle elements. Because there are several possible solutions to later levels, the origami cranes ensure you’ve seen what you need to see to prove you can solve all the routes—but still leaves you the ability to pick your own path forward.

The Orange Box?

The level design of High Entropy basically amounts to polished yet pragmatic minimalism. In the version I played, the aesthetic is really just polished greybox¹, but it is used skillfully in a manner that makes the design feel intentional, not unpolished.

It owns the format, and it’s used in a way that evokes a rough industrial office building format, giving the nod to the gridded concrete walls you see in Portal. It works—I had too many good looking screenshots to pick from.

Puzzle Quality and Mechanics

The last levels of High Entropy are more significant in scope and amp up the duration. You’re expected to use every mechanic you’ve learned in the earlier levels, and getting 100% doesn’t just mean finding every path, but also following the right routes at the right time. Some hit a level of difficulty where it feels better to quit out and revisit it again in a few hours. Of course, it does feel rewarding to eventually finish a level you’ve been stuck on, once you’ve figured out just what you’ve missed.

Around level thirteen, I realized the game is also being optimized for speedrunning². Restarting a few times to sequence my route in just the right order, I realized that the walking bots are timed so you can flow through some rooms in just one-cycle of the bots.

It’s excellent work for a one-person game. Sure, a few puzzles could make better use of player hinting. I got very stuck in a 100% attempt of level seven—an area I was trying to access was pitch black, and there was nothing to hint to me to look there. Scratches, wear patterns, or a telltale light would have helped me to discover the new route to take. After about twenty minutes of searching, I found that I needed to hop on top of a vending machine. The game is typically successful with this, though. It also offers interactive outlines for things you can interact with, but often the outlines don’t appear until you’re already close enough to the object you need to interact with, so they don’t actually help with discovering things you’re missing.

I played High Entropy version 0.3.1. My play time was just over three hours. It is available on itch.io for windows, but a full release will be available on Steam. The game is a test build, but don’t let that deter you from playing—a story mode is coming soon for the Steam release, which will probably add an overarching narrative for the existing puzzles.

Bird of Passage, by SpaceBackyard, is an atmospheric narrative puzzle, set in taxi cabs traveling the streets of Tokyo.

You play as a low-poly ghost-bird-eye-thing (a technical term, of course), and you travel at night in taxis, recounting your stories to the drivers who take you around. It turns out that the ghost you embody died in the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, and is seeking answers as they continue along their path.

The atmosphere and vibrancy of the deconstructed Tokyo are lovely. The game boils down its vision of Tokyo to just the bare essentials to deliver its view of Tokyo—a taxi cab, various taxi stops, bright lights, and road markings all serve to give you the feel of a big city without actually rendering a big city.

This is a perfect game for a pensive dark rainy day. It’s not quite the same, but I found myself getting lost in thoughts in this game—like when you’re a passenger in a long car ride and your mind starts to drift.

Gameplay Tip:

It’s not necessarily easy to intuit the best choices to progress the story. For the best route to the end of the game, and to avoid repetition, keep track of your dialogue choices. One of the taxis you enter will give you a hint for what you’re looking for—once you heed their tip, the route to get to the end of the game will be clear enough with a little bit more trial and error.

My playtime of Bird of Passage was about 30 minutes—but yours can be a bit shorter with the non-spoiler gameplay tip above. It is available on itch.io for macOS and Windows.

It’s been just over a week since Panic’s Playdate was announced, and we’ve learned some more about crankified console since the teaser, so we’re rounding up what we know so far here.

First gameplay footage

We’ve seen the first gameplay footage of the Playdate, featuring Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure. The Playdate is Keita Takahashi’s own DVT1 prototype ¹ and was recorded and posted on YouTube by Kohichi Aoki.

The live demo of Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure mostly matches the content we’ve already seen on the play.date teaser page. The demo features three dates, where Crankin rushes to his date with Crankette—but we see a player actually cranking the Playdate for the first time.

Processor Specs

The attentive @MstrBlinky on twitter sleuthed and found that Playdate is using an STM32 (ARM Cortex-M7) microcontroller—precisely the STM32F7, as revealed by Panic engineer Dave Hayden. The Playdate will run at 180 MHz, running at a lower voltage to allow for better battery life. App Developer @zhuowei pulled an interesting stat based on this reveal: The Playdate has 62x the CPU power of a Game Boy Advance.

Most games will run at 30 FPS, but the Playdate’s OS will display some transitions at higher than the 30 FPS framerate—it’s presently unknown if developers will be able to leverage this too (such as, in the C SDK).

The Talk Show

Panic’s Cabel Sasser, Steven Frank, and Greg Maletic joined John Gruber for an episode of The Talk Show. Clocking in just over two hours—because when is The Talk Show podcast ever brief—it’s packed with details about Playdate. Here are some interesting details from the podcast:

• The Playdate was inspired by the early Nintendo Game & Watch games, which inspired Panic’s use of the 1-bit Sharp Memory LCD display.
• Cabel revealed that Playdate’s codename is Asheville, named after the first time the Panic crew met Teenage Engineering at Moogfest, an electronic music festival.
• Panic deliberated a long time on the button naming, landing on the classic A and B, but not without deliberating on other possible buttons, including different dots, shapes, and lines. A and B are nostalgic and easily communicate button meanings.
• Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure was selected as the feature game for the play.date announcement page, because it featured the strongest use of the crank.
• The environment in Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure was built in Maya, and rendered down to frames with the 1-bit artwork you see on the Playdate.

Game Sideloading + SDK

We know that Playdate is shipping with its “Season One” of games—twelve games, one each week. In the teaser site, it’s not clear about adding new games to the device outside of what ships with Season One. We now know that users will, at the very least, be able to Sideload games onto the Playdate. There’s no word yet about a Season Two of games, or any sort of Playdate Game Store.

Additional SDK information was also revealed in The Talk Show:

• The SDK is composed of a compiler, and a device simulator—a playdate which runs on the screen.
• You can use Lua or C to program your game. If you need to extract additional performance from primarily Lua-based game, you can also write a C library to extract extra performance.
• Games can presently be loaded onto the Playdate by USB via a Coda 2 extension (but also the new Panic editor, too).

We’ll keep up with Playdate SDK coverage here, as new information becomes available.

Playdate is undoubtedly shaping up to be revolutionary—we’re more excited than ever. You can follow all of our Playdate coverage here in the Playdate tag. You can also keep with the latest by following us on Twitter, @missingquests.