Portugues
<corrib75>
Saved games stay in this browser only.
About the game
The year is 1999. Karen, a researcher, is called in by the professor she has been working with: his virtual world is finished and about to go live, and he wants her to be among its first visitors. The whole place is run by a core AI that adjusts the experience for each user, and he is very proud of it. Karen pulls on a haptic suit, joins the #research channel as corrib75 and steps in.
What follows is a short puzzle game set inside that world, twelve levels of it. Each one is a floating maze of floor tiles to cross from the entry point to the exit. Some blocks can be pushed, and getting them into the right place is usually the key: a block in the path of a laser beam cuts it off, and a block in the wrong corner can shut the way for good. Gaps in the floor are crossed with a dash forward, step off the edge and you fall, and teleporter pads link distant parts of a level.
Along the way, figures inside the simulation stop to talk, and the messages grow stranger the further you go. The story is short and best discovered by playing.
gearfo made it in C for the Game Boy Competition 2021, where it was shortlisted, drawing every tile and composing the music himself. It is a "black cart" game: full colour on the Game Boy Color, and still playable in monochrome on the original Game Boy.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Game Boy: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in binjgb, a Game Boy emulator compiled to WebAssembly, in its Game Boy Color version. Click Play and wait for the title screen, then press Enter.
The cartridge remembers the level you reached in its battery memory, which is kept in this browser, and offers to continue the next time. F2 also saves the emulator state and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | Game Boy button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Arrow keys | Control Pad | walk, push blocks |
| X | A | talk to people; dismiss messages |
| Z | B | dash forward across a gap; dismiss messages |
| Shift or Ctrl | Select | restart the level |
| Enter | Start | start, continue |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the emulator state |
A few things worth knowing
Stuck? Restart. A block pushed into a corner cannot be pulled back. Select resets the room at once, with no penalty.
Look before you dash. The dash carries you straight ahead over a gap, so line yourself up first.
Block the beams. A laser stops at the first block in its path, so the answer to a beam is usually a well-placed block.
Talk to everyone. The people in the rooms carry the story, and sometimes a hint.