The Stack

Windosill is the sort of game where you have to poke at things to see how they react. It’s drawn comparisons to Cyan’s early works, such as The Manhole and Cosmic Osmo, because of its surrealist busy-box vibe. Those games, though intended for children, always had a slight tinge of menace to them, which I don’t think was intentional; it was just a side-effect of the gameworld’s utter unpredictability. In Windosill, though, it’s definitely intended, and contributes to the toybox-of-mystery ambience. Everything is clean and flat-shaded, but the palette tends towards dark blues and there are eyes where there shouldn’t be eyes.

It’s basically a Flash-based adventure game, consisting of a series of one-screen rooms. In each room, there are things that can be clicked and things that can be dragged and even things that can be spun or thrown; although the interaction is basically two-dimensional, the models are clearly 3D, and things tend to bounce and judder in response to your actions in a satisfyingly physical way (especially in comparison to other Flash adventures, which seldom go beyond clicking on things to trigger scripted behavior). Your goal in each room is to find a cube, which you then use to unlock a door, through which you drag a boxy toy car (cyan in color) to go to the next room. In most rooms, getting access to the cube means that the puzzle content is over, but the ritual of unlocking the door and moving the car gives the rooms an extra bit of unity, and provides a basis for unexpected variation at one point, when a room’s inhabitants grab the car away from you.

The whole thing can be completed in a single sitting, and in fact pretty much has to be, because there’s no way to save your progress. As such, I suppose a lot of people will balk at paying for the full version, even though it’s only three dollars. After all, there are tons of Flash adventure games out there that are completely free. I see it as a small price to support good interactive art.