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Lad 2024
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About the game
Lad 2024 is a push-block puzzle game with a twist about light. Each stage is a small room with walls, boxes, bombs and lamps, and each lamp throws a straight beam in one direction until something blocks it. You control two kinds of character: a robot that can only move while a beam is shining on it, and a person who can only move while no beam touches them. Only the robot can pick up the bombs, and a stage is cleared when every bomb is gone.
Everything else can be pushed: boxes, bombs, the lamps themselves and even the other character. Moving a lamp or a box changes where the beams fall, which in turn decides who can move, so most stages come down to shuffling the two characters and the lights until the robot has a lit path to each bomb. Walls never move.
The first stages teach the rules one at a time with short messages on screen, and from there the game has more than 1,300 stages: the ones from the original and many more produced by a stage generator and solver the author wrote for this version.
Playing it here
Lad 2024 was made for WASM-4, a fantasy console: an imaginary handheld with a 160 by 160 screen, four colours, a D-pad and two buttons, for which independent developers write new games. It is the author's port of Lad, a game he wrote in 1994 in x86 assembler for the NEC PC-9800 computers and rediscovered decades later on an old disk. It runs here in the official WASM-4 runtime. Click Play and the first stage, which doubles as the title screen, starts right away.
Your progress is saved automatically on the game's WASM-4 disk, which stays in this browser: the next time you play, you are back on the stage where you stopped, and the bottom line shows how much of the game you have cleared. Enter opens the WASM-4 menu, where you can also save and load the state while the page is open (2 and 4 do the same directly). A gamepad works too, and on touch screens an on-screen D-pad and buttons appear.
Controls
| Key | WASM-4 button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Arrow keys | D-pad | move the current character; push |
| X | button 1 | switch to the other character |
| Z + Down | button 2 + D-pad | undo the last move |
| Z + Up | button 2 + D-pad | give up and reset the stage |
| Z + Right / Left | button 2 + D-pad | next / previous stage (hold to skip faster) |
| Click or tap | mouse | move to a spot, push an object next to you, switch characters |
| Enter | — | WASM-4 menu |
ESDF also move, Space or V works as X, and C as Z.
A few things worth knowing
Look at the beams before you move. The lit squares show exactly who can move where. Before pushing anything, work out which beams it will block or open up.
Undo is free. Z with Down takes back one move at a time, so there is no need to reset a stage after a single slip.
Skipping is allowed. Z with Right moves on to the next stage, and the game keeps track of which ones you have cleared, so a stubborn stage can wait for later.
Credits and licence
Lad 2024 was created by YAMAMOTO Takashi, who wrote the original Lad in 1994 and this version, in C, from 2024 on, including the stage tools and the music. It is released under the 2-clause BSD licence, published with the source code in his repository on GitHub, as is the 1994 original. It runs here in the WASM-4 runtime (ISC licence). The licence text is linked from this page.