Konkan Coast Pirate Solutions
released on Mar 01, 2023
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Light programming-ish puzzler which plays a bit like a minimalist Chu Chu Rocket. Some pirate ships are sailing, and you need to place arrows in the water to direct them to port. A handful of quirks - ships pick up arrows and drop them when they reach the next arrow, ships automatically follow other ships that pass in front, etc - add complexity and force you to get the most out of very limited resources.
The puzzles are ace, really well-designed and only as big as they need to be. It feels like each puzzle introduces a new trick. Some of the best puzzle games are about discovering surprising interactions, and Konkan has that in spades, to the point of including a few pre-solved puzzles just to show how intricate things could have gotten if the puzzle designer was crueler. The whole game is pretty short - about 4 hours for me to solve every puzzle (with a couple of hints for two I couldn't figure out), but many puzzles are skippable so you can probably see the credits in an hour or so.
The game is a little buggy. There's a graphics glitch that makes a lot of midgame puzzles really irritating. Ships which are going to move more than the usual single square in a turn jump to their endpoint and then tween back and forth. This makes it very hard to visually comprehend how ships and arrows are moving past each other. I also found a consistent crash relating to queuing ships waiting for other queues - can't remember what I did exactly to reproduce it, but it turns out the game doesn't autosave if it crashes, so watch out.
The premise is about a band of pirates building a simulation product that helps pirates do piracy less violently and make the world a better place. It's a slightly dubious premise - how come all these cozy games are about being good at capitalism? - but it pays off in the endgame.
The fact that the simulation can tell when it's stuck in a loop is a nice quality-of-life feature, but it also suggests that the pirates have solved the Halting Problem. These boys need to give up piracy and buy themselves a computer.
The puzzles are ace, really well-designed and only as big as they need to be. It feels like each puzzle introduces a new trick. Some of the best puzzle games are about discovering surprising interactions, and Konkan has that in spades, to the point of including a few pre-solved puzzles just to show how intricate things could have gotten if the puzzle designer was crueler. The whole game is pretty short - about 4 hours for me to solve every puzzle (with a couple of hints for two I couldn't figure out), but many puzzles are skippable so you can probably see the credits in an hour or so.
The game is a little buggy. There's a graphics glitch that makes a lot of midgame puzzles really irritating. Ships which are going to move more than the usual single square in a turn jump to their endpoint and then tween back and forth. This makes it very hard to visually comprehend how ships and arrows are moving past each other. I also found a consistent crash relating to queuing ships waiting for other queues - can't remember what I did exactly to reproduce it, but it turns out the game doesn't autosave if it crashes, so watch out.
The premise is about a band of pirates building a simulation product that helps pirates do piracy less violently and make the world a better place. It's a slightly dubious premise - how come all these cozy games are about being good at capitalism? - but it pays off in the endgame.
The fact that the simulation can tell when it's stuck in a loop is a nice quality-of-life feature, but it also suggests that the pirates have solved the Halting Problem. These boys need to give up piracy and buy themselves a computer.
Once I set up an intuitive steam deck control scheme, it played super well handheld. What a pleasant and lovely game! Incredibly satisfying game. The sounds and the clockwork of the machine once you solve a puzzle is chefs kiss.