Squareometry

PC

This is perhaps a somewhat unusual thing to do, but today I would like to recommend a game I can barely play.

Squareometry is deceptively simple looking to the degree of outright dishonesty. All you have to do is move the black block to the green gate, that’s all. And in the way are some circles that move about. That’s it. That’s all. I am fantastically terrible at it.

But what’s so weird is how much I’m enjoying being terrible. The solutions are right there! You can see what to do. There’s a path, you’ve just got to take it. And then for some reason as I set off along that path something in my brain fizzes and pops and I react in the exact opposite direction. So I try again, and do exactly the same thing. Over and over. Like a broken robot.

But I keep trying! And then, presumably by some sort of reverse-glitch, at some point I accidentally get it right and finish the level! Such victory! Such achievement! And then start the same thing over on the next.

I’ll be honest, I’ll not pretend this started far, far into the game, and I breezed through the earlier levels. I’ve stopped to start writing this at this point:

I figured out animated gifs so much did I want to share with you my incompetence. All I have to do here is is get that black square bottom right to move over the four little diamond-thingies, and then that red gate goes green and I can leave. I have not yet done it. I have tried so very many times. There are no surprises. The game doesn’t suddenly pull a fast one and have any of the circles fly off (the sudden jump in the image above is because of how it loops, which is VERY WELL if I say so myself). I just, in the heat of the attempt, lose all my faculties and make peculiar mistakes.

I’ll tell you the hardest bit. It’s that square of circles at the bottom middle. Two other circles fly in and out of them, and obviously they’re turning pretty fast, so it takes a bit of deftness to get through there. I can do that bit. It’s just that immediately after I do, I’ll just forget about the column of four moving side to side across the middle of the screen, and just sit still and let them hit me.

I mean, I swear to God, since I wrote that paragraph above I’ve done that two more times.

I DID IT. I bloody did it. Not before the game awarded me an achievement mocking just how many times I’d failed. BUT I DID IT.

And repeat. For the rest of my life.

I really love this! I cannot justify this well. I guess sometimes it’s just fun to be rubbish at something. But it’s really nicely presented, the music is fun, and it’s no slapdash effort – the controls and timings are incredibly precise. And if you happened to be good at it, well I cannot imagine how thrilling that would be.

It’s pretty daft that developer Xutiz Development is only charging 80p for this. But it makes it an absolute must to buy – if you couldn’t even get off the second left you’d have had your money’s worth at that price. You might get to see the levels where you can switch shape, which I sure as heck haven’t reached.

• Xutiz Development
• Steam
• 80p/€90/$1

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