The Stack

In a reply to an earlier post, corto writes:

I too am a fan of games modeling other types of games inside themselves. The Sokoban levels in nethack are another example – I’m trying to think of others.

I have to mention Heaven and Earth, a game from 1991 featuring abstract puzzles by Scott Kim. There are 12 types of puzzle in the game, several of which are used to model other types of puzzles.

For example, one of the types of puzzle involves assembling a given pattern out of pieces made of line segments on a grid. This is straightforward at first: you look at your pieces, you look at where they might fit in the target shape, you put them together. It’s like tangrams, except that the pieces are made of lines and are allowed to overlap. But after a while, you get a puzzle that’s not like that at all: instead of the target pattern being a composite of the pieces, it’s just the same disconnected pieces, arranged differently. Suddenly the constraints of the space matter. The thing that makes it hard isn’t figuring out which piece goes where, but getting them were they belong. If you allow two pieces to touch, they stick together, which isn’t what you want. And the meager empty space isn’t large enough to contain an entire piece, so you have to shift and shuffle them around. In short, it uses the rules of a pattern-assembly puzzle to create a sliding-block puzzle. Again, this is not the only example in the game.

I notice that Mac and MS-DOS versions of Heaven and Earth have been made available for free download by its creators. The DOS version runs under Windows XP, but had no sound when I tried it. Presumably VDMSound would help there.