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Black Hole Square
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About the game
Black Hole Square is a quiet puzzle game about cleaning up the universe. Each puzzle is a small board with a few white squares, some marked with an arrow, and one or more black holes. Tap a square and it acts: an arrow square moves one step in its direction, pushing the squares in front of it, and a square that lands on a black hole disappears into it. The puzzle is solved when no white square is left.
The catch is the move counter at the top of the board, which allows only a few taps, and the order matters. Each puzzle has a name that hints at its trick, such as "The click", "The tango" or "The substitute", and new kinds of squares appear as the puzzles get harder.
Quinten Clause made the game for js13kGames 2021, whose theme was "Space", with the code, the graphics and a soft generated soundtrack fitting in a zip of 13 kilobytes.
Playing it here
This is the version submitted to the competition, with two lines removed: the original installed itself as an offline app in your browser, and that part has been taken out here; the game itself is unchanged. Click Play, then swipe left (press the mouse button, drag to the left and release) to go through the introduction and reach the first puzzle. The puzzle you reached is saved in this browser.
The original release also has three bonus puzzles that unlock for visitors who support the author through Web Monetization, a browser payment standard. They stay locked unless your browser has a Web Monetization extension installed; this site has nothing to do with that.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Click or tap a square | trigger it |
| Swipe left | next puzzle (skip) |
| Swipe right | reset the puzzle, or go back to earlier ones |
With a mouse, a swipe is a drag: press, move sideways and release.
A few things worth knowing
Read the name. Each puzzle's title is a small hint about the idea behind it.
Count before you tap. There are no moves to spare, so every tap has to do real work. If you are out of moves with squares left, swipe right and start over.
Think in chains. A square pushed by an arrow can stop next to another one and set up the next move, so plan the sequence backwards from the black hole.
Skipping is allowed. If a puzzle has you stuck, swipe left and come back to it later.
Credits and licence
Black Hole Square was created by Quinten Clause, who wrote the code, designed the puzzles and made the graphics and music. It is released under the MIT licence, published in his repository on GitHub. The licence text is linked from this page.