Leaving The Craddle

It's a very interesting game, as you have to think how to place the cells to win the game. I also liked the UI and the idea itself, as it's not the classical approach of the Game Of Life.

When I started playing this game, I promptly brushed it off as too simplistic: you build a diagonal or horizontal glider and hope for the best. "Some levels are impossible", I thought naively, "What a joke!". Little did I know that this game would teach me an important life lesson - always give people the benefit of the doubt.

It happened one bright summer day. I was trapped in my routine life like a rat in its wheel. I have completely forgotten about this game, and yet it seems to have resided deep in mind, for out of nowhere, I was mysteriously lured by it. Akin to a siren song, the ASCII graphics with an enticing colorscheme made my mind at peace. I don't remember how I got home, but I found myself in front of the monitor with the game booted. A few levels in, I was hooked.

I started playing every time I had the chance. I was immersed. At first the losses were frequent, and yet I wouldn't stop. I was put under a spell. Slowly, I was discovering new mechanics. Silly little tricks, like timing two gliders to collapse at just the right time to make a larger explosion were replaced by more ingenious constructions. Then my brain started really getting into the right frame of thinking - it seems I learned to simulate the cellular automata in my head, because I was coming up with better patterns like crazy. Once, one of those "impossible" levels came up. I was ready to just give up and flunk it, when suddenly, the cells came alive before I hit the key. I was hallucinating the simulation! And not just one simulation, thousands of combinations of starting positions and subsequent moves, all playing out at the same time, like overlapping ghosts. My brain was learning faster than I could acknowledge it. Then, suddenly, I saw it. The perfect sequence of timed cell placements to pass the level. I did it. I achieved what I had deemed theoretically impossible. Is this it? Is this the perfect ending? Far from it. The game wouldn't let me go that easily. Oh, no. What seemed like the peak of human ingenuity, was only the first stage of the act.

I took up the challenge. I isolated myself from the outside world to dedicate all my resources into devil's creation. Feats of engineering I hadn't thought possible were evolving before my eyes. With each passing milestone, the game further opened its depths up to me (yes, it has a lore). I came back to reality only when my growling stomach would wake me up from my slumber. My dreams consisted of brute-forcing novel pattern variations until I stumbled upon promising ones to study when awake. When I was forced to take my focused gaze off the monitor, all I could see were patterns around me. The game was consuming me, and I let it.

I woke up in the hospital bed. They said I had been in a coma for weeks, and yet all I could remember were indefinitely chaotic patterns, godly creations of impossibly large scales.

I can't stop you from playing it. All I can do is warn you - Don't take this game lightly! It can reveal you the secrets of the Universe, but be careless, fly too close to the sun, and it will take you to the deepest pits of hell.

This game's visual style is very enticing. The story applied to the Game of Life sparked my imagination and surprised me with its creativity. The UI is very pleasant and fits the theme and setting of the game perfectly. The new rules added to the game, are simple but add a welcome layer of complexity. I must admit, the only thing that startled me was the absence of a cameo by Willem Dafoe. His presence in your last game was truly magical and was what brought it to life. Other than that, this game is an example of how Conway's game of life needs to be adapted with new rules and a story. 10/10!!

It is an interesting and quite simple game, if you know the combinations from Game of Life (especially Glider). He has quite an interesting idea with the missions on Mars and limitations in days on Mars. I didn't expect Game of Life to have a plot