Pinch Points

About the game

The tide is out and the beach is full of crabs. They walk forward in a straight line, and at a wall they turn by a fixed rule, so on a bare board they just pace back and forth. Your only tool is the arrow: put one on a tile in the sand, and every creature that walks over it turns that way. Place enough of them in the right spots, and the crabs go where you want them to go: into the castle on the far side of the board, with the red flag on it.

In the campaign you get a handful of arrows and a puzzle: one board, a limited number of arrows, and a flow of crabs to steer home. The hundred levels start with a tutorial that cannot be lost and grow into boards with turnstile logs that split a stream in two, kelp that crabs can cross but gulls cannot, tide pools that slow whoever wades in, and crabs of different kinds. Every crab has a claw bigger than the other, and a left-clawed crab tries to turn left at a wall where a right-clawed one tries right, so one corridor can send two crabs to two different places. A level only counts when it can be won with the arrows it gives you and cannot be won without them; the author's test suite proves this for all hundred.

In versus, two to six players share a board, each with a castle, and everyone places arrows at the same time. Crabs are worth different amounts: the common one is worth one point, the speedy juvenile two, the slow giant ten, a molting crab pulls every loose crab toward your castle for a few seconds, a golden crab is worth thirty and is announced with a banner, and a sparkling one spins a roulette of random events. Gulls eat crabs and can be steered with arrows too, and one that reaches a rival's castle carries off a third of its score. The tide is the clock: in the last thirty seconds the gulls arrive twice as fast. Empty seats are played by an AI at three levels, so you can play alone against it or with friends on one keyboard and gamepads.

There is also a co-op set of stages for two players, who each own their own arrows and steer only the crabs of one claw; a daily challenge with one board per day for everybody; a shelf of 48 trophies; and a level editor, with a solver that checks whether the level you built can be won, where you can make your own puzzles and versus maps.

Pinch Points was made by Arnaud Gourlay in Rust with the Bevy engine. Most of the commits in its repository credit an AI coding assistant as co-author.

Playing it here

The game runs in the page and is played with the keyboard, and with gamepads if you plug them in. Click Click to play and wait for the download, about 18 MB, which holds the whole game, music included. The first time you play, it asks which of its eight languages to use. The language, settings, campaign progress, trophies and the levels you build in the editor are kept in your browser. This is the browser version: the parts of the desktop game that need a network (playing over a local network) or files (the replay shelf, share codes, the highlight reel) are left out.

Controls

Enter starts a round, M mutes the sound, N and P change level in the campaign, and Esc pauses or goes back. In the campaign list, C sets up a co-op game.

Tips

Think about where a crab will turn, not only where it is. Follow a crab's path, tile by tile, to the first wall, and put your arrow on the tile before it.

Arrows are few, so use each twice. One arrow can turn every crab that comes along the same lane.

In versus, watch the gulls. A gull aimed at a leader's castle takes a third of its score, and it is a better use of an arrow than another crab.

Save the lure for when it counts. A molting crab pulls every loose crab your way and overrides all arrows for a few seconds.

Credits and licence

Pinch Points was made by Arnaud Gourlay and is released under the Apache License 2.0. The pictures and sounds are generated by scripts in the repository; the fonts are DejaVu Sans Mono, Nunito and a subset of Noto Sans Mono CJK, each with its own licence. For the browser, a small set of changes was made to the game's sources, listed in the licence text and published as a patch; the licences of the Rust libraries compiled into it, the patch and the build script are linked from this page.

FAQ

It shows a button and nothing else. Click it: the browser only allows sound once you have clicked, and the download starts then.

It does not react to the keys. Click once on the game to give it the keyboard focus.

Is my progress saved? Yes, in this browser: language, settings, campaign progress, trophies and your own levels. Clearing the site's data erases them.

Can I play over a network? Not in the browser version. For that, the author's desktop version is on GitHub.