Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘Pictassembler’ and ‘Atchafalaya Arcade’
Pixels ahoy
Pictassembler is an engineering puzzle game created by Active Up Games, an indie studio based in the USA and run by Dan Williams. Players are working for a picture company when disaster struck; all of the pictures shattered at the same time. Rather than wasting our time looking for a culprit, the player is tasked with putting the pictures back together again through… well, let’s just say unconventional means.
The key to creating these pictures is through marbles, which are shot out of the purple operator block, creating a pixel art block upon touching the anchor or another pixel block. Without an anchor, marbles will not stick to any of the blocks to start the picture. This means that both the operator and anchor are critical to completing the game. They can both be placed anywhere on the grid, but since the goal is to fill in the shaded areas using the marbles the anchor will at least be within the picture shade. This alone can take a bit of time to understand, but after a few tries and a bit of playing around this mechanic comes easily.
Where things get tricky is when the pixel pictures start to require more than one marble, as the operator only ever shoots one and players are only allowed one operator and one anchor. This is where the second section of shapes kicks in, starting with the triangles. The maroon-coloured right-angle triangles are what allows the player to bounce the marbles around the map, but the teal obtuse triangles are what allow the marbles to split. If a marble hits the top pointed tip of the triangle, it splits in half and has each new marble created go in opposite perpendicular directions. Positioning is extremely important, for now players need to ensure that the two marbles can get to their destination without overlaping. The triangles are solid, meaning that if a marble hits the ‘back’ of one then it will reverse and go in the opposite direction — this is actually more useful than one might think as the levels move onward.
This does not include the many shapes that are added later on, or the colour dies that add a shade of black to the originally white marble for every time they pass through. These pigments can cause serious headaches as players will need to get the marble to pass through multiple black nodes to get the right colour, and make sure that other marbles don’t pass through them to keep their specific colour. It just keeps adding to the complexity of the puzzle, especially when even the direction the marbles are coming from can cause headaches. After all, once the anchor pixel has been ‘drawn’, all marbles that pass by that square will draw beside it, meaning that the entire painting can get messed up instantly. Suddenly, getting the board set up tightly to gain more points seems like more of a bonus than just getting the painting to work.
All of this culminates in one of the most expansive and confusing — yet ridiculously satisfying — puzzles I’ve come across in a while. You know you’re going to be setting up this marble track forever, trying different techniques and finally getting it to work and watching all of your progress vanish within half a second as it completes. Think of it like dominoes — setting them all up takes forever, but damn does it leave a pretty picture when it is done. If you love massive puzzles that use space to its fullest potential, give this one a try.
Atchafalaya Arcade is an interactive music and visual piece created by Tambalaya, an indie dev based in the USA. Using the nostalgic aesthetic of the GameBoy and GameBoy Advance, players will input ‘funky’ chiptune beats and watch their bayou grow. Or in my case, whatever that is above.
Using the only two buttons available to a GameBoy, players will receive two sounds depending on what button they press which will create two pieces of abstract art. The first is the sounds, for they can blend in with the background music to create some nonsensical music full of chaos and chiptune fun. The second is seen above, imagery that follows an algorithm that takes inspiration from the bayous of Southern USA. They can snake throughout the screen, growing long and tall or patchy and sporadic; but they are influenced by how the player plays notes.
If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you might be confused as to how I played this; after all, it requires an emulator, and I notoriously skip many emulated games due to not really having any. Thankfully, this is remedied as the installed Tambalaya includes has VisualBoyAdvance, so you can play this game as much as you want. Even if it didn’t, VBA is one of the few emulators I own due to my obsession with a certain Fire Emblem series that never made its way over to North America.
Nevertheless, Atchafalaya Arcade showcases the chaos that can come from music and art while also giving many of us nostalgic for the GBA a chance to play around with those old graphics and make something wild. Have fun!
