Shift Escape is an abstract puzzle game for iOS by Toby Nelson. Toby’s also maintainer of the Inform 7 IDE for Mac OS, and (non-coincidentally) my brother-in-law. So my remarks should perhaps not be viewed as wholly impartial, but I’m enjoying it. The interface has a cheerfully hand-drawn look; the puzzles themselves are elegant if occasionally fiendish.
The aim is to move your character to eat all the dots on each level before leaving, with the restriction that your motion can only be stopped by walls, so if you head in one direction, you’ll keep sliding along willy-nilly. The geometry of some levels means it becomes possible to lock yourself out of ever reaching certain dots, but even if you don’t do that, there’s the challenge of optimizing your number of moves.
The slide-til-you-hit-something rules make the floor-plate-activated flippers a significant complication:
It doesn’t all take place on a square grid, either…
And here I am losing, because every time I try to get that dot in the lower right corner I have to pass over the blue diamond and that moves the blue flipper out of the way and I overshoot and argh
If the flipper toggles, first hitting it vertically might help.
What will really help is hitting it vertically twice.
Wait I guess that’s not necessary.
Yeah. Though by the time I realized this I was already well over the target number of shifts for the level; you can still pass the level that way, but it feels less clean…
Any chance of this showing up on Android?
I don’t know what his plans might be there, I’m afraid.
The first picture you posted is of a level in an unwinnable state, isn’t it? You should have started by going right. :-)
Looks good, but I don’t have access to any iOs devices.
Yep, that one little dot is marooned, I think.