Scalak
By: Michal Pawlowski
Ever since I played his relaxing puzzler, Zenge, I’ve been keeping an eye out for Michal Pawlowski aka Hamster on Coke’s games. Art of Gravity didn’t really pull me in (sorry not sorry), but I had a great time with the all-too-brief “PUSH” he developed with Maciej Targoni. So I was happy to play his upcoming game, Scalak, ahead of release. He’s been adding content to it over the last month or two and he’s finally ready to announce that it’s releasing on May 23rd. Since I’ve played through most of it, I thought I’d give you a taste of some of the puzzles you can expect.
In Scalak, your goal is to complete patterns. Early on, things start very basic, with you dragging the inner part of a square to the rest of it to complete the square. Soon, you’ll have to work with other basic shapes like triangles and circles. The cutouts then get more intricate, and you might have a central cube that you need to rotate before dragging the pieces to it. The pieces themselves can only be added or removed from the cube, but you can’t rotate them on their own. So it’s very much a game about perception.
Every few levels, new mechanics are introduced to keep things from getting stale. In fact, the first few levels almost look like a completely different game from the last few levels. And while it may look simple at a glance, things do get trickier. But there are no timers or move counters or penalties for messing up. You can take as much time as you want to work out a puzzle. So, like Zenge, it’s relaxing and feels great on a touchscreen.
There are ninety levels in total, and you can get a sample of them by watching my gameplay video above. If you’re a puzzle fan, you’ll definitely want to check this one out, but I’ll have more info for you as it gets closer to release. You should be able to pick up Scalak for yourself on May 23rd.
