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A Cog's Life
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About the game
A Cog's Life is a puzzle in which you are a single white cog in a world of other cogs. Each board is a small maze of walls, cogs and grey racks (straight bars), and a pale striped square marks the exit. When you roll into another cog or a rack, you push it, and gears turn as they move; orange and blue cogs also turn by themselves every time you take a step, clockwise and counter-clockwise respectively, so you have to work out which pieces will block you, which will carry you along and which will be in the way next turn.
Short lines of text introduce the first levels ("I am but a cog", "A simple part of a complex whole") and give the game a gentle, melancholy tone. After three title screens spelled out in cogs, the five puzzle boards get steadily bigger, with more cogs, walls and racks. The game is a text file for the PuzzleScript engine, and the cogs are drawn with the engine's own pixel graphics.
Playing it here
Click Play and press X to start. Your progress is kept in this browser, and the game picks up at the level where you stopped. On a phone or tablet, on-screen buttons appear. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Arrow keys, W A S D or on-screen pad | roll your cog |
| Z or U | undo the last move |
| R | restart the level |
| X, C or Space | continue past a message |
A few things worth knowing
Watch the colours. Orange cogs turn clockwise and blue ones counter-clockwise every time you move, so you can predict where they will be.
Undo is free. Each move turns many pieces at once, so try a step, look at what moved and take it back.
Find the pale square. Your cog has to end up on it; the way is often blocked by racks and cogs that you must push aside first.
Credits and licence
A Cog's Life was made by Dennis Au and published under the MIT licence in the repository mechturk/PuzzlescriptGames. The licence text, together with the licence of the engine, is linked from this page. The page is the standard standalone export of the PuzzleScript engine (MIT, Stephen Lavelle) with the game text inside; we only removed the link to the author's site and the "hack" button, which would send the code to another site, and replaced the one small part of the engine that was under another licence (GPL) with our own code.