Ah, puzzle games.  Puzzle games are one of the very first types of games that got me hooked on gaming in general.  Remember those three excellent 3D puzzle games acquired by Dreamcatcher in the late 1990s:  Jewels of the Oracle, Jewels II and Quest For Karma?  Virtually no story, precious little dialog, just hours and hours of puzzly goodness.

In this tradition comes wildman independent game maker from Down Under, Peter Hewitt.  Hewitt already has a good track record with his own spin on the puzzle game, with crowd-pleasing titles like Magnetic and Xiama.

His latest opus is Magicama: Beyond Words, and it’s available for download and purchase at the Mulawa Dreaming website. 

Magicama doesn’t have the budget those Dreamcatcher games had, but what Hewitt does with his resources is pretty miraculous.  It’s the most generous puzzle game for the PC that I can think of since 1999’s Pandora’s Box.  By that I mean that there are 30 different puzzles with several stages each, resulting in well over 100 challenges to conquer.

The challenge Hewitt tasked himself with was to create a game which contained absolutely no words at all, and the result is indeed quirky and interesting.  You need to have a bit of patience with Magicama, but if you get into the proper groove, the results can be quite rewarding.

A game’s musical score is an obvious area that can suffer with a pint-size budget.  However, Hewitt neatly rises to this challenge with by using a piano score based on arrangements by Bunji Hisamori.  The score includes everything from Beethoven to Debussy to Grieg, and it is a pleasure to listen to as you try to bend your mind around the puzzles. 

The game opens with no instructions, no introduction, simply a series of lovely still and 360 degree scanable photographic images of the Australian countryside.  After poking around a bit, you find an abandoned brief case.  You open it, discover the first puzzle, and you’re off.

Again, everything in the game is accomplished with symbols only, no words.  So learning the interface takes a little experimentation.  Want a clue?  Click on Peter Hewitt’s head and you can purchase a clue for your current puzzle with points you accumulate solving earlier puzzles.  Want to go choose another puzzle?  Click the map of Australia.  And so on.  Once you solve one version of a new puzzle you can move on to another, or continue doing more challenging versions of the puzzle you’re on, including timed trials.

Each new puzzle is introduced in the same way:  Exploring photographic images of the outdoors and discovering the next puzzle-holding brief case. 

The puzzles themselves are variations on every 2D puzzle you’ve ever seen, plus lots of new ones.  There’s a very challenging riff on jigsaws, a color-creating puzzle that reminded me of my favorite childhood toy Spirograph, and inevitable variations on Soduku.  There are variations on Mastermind and Concentration (two of my favorites), tanagrams, and fiendishly challenging pattern-matching and pattern-creation challenges.  It just goes on and on.

Operating the puzzles is a point-and-click affair, but frequently a big part of the challenge is simply to figure out what the puzzle wants you to do.  This requires a bit of experimentation and exploration of the puzzle itself.  Poke around enough, and you’re likely to have that familiar “Aha!” moment, and you’ll ready to start solving the puzzle.  Get too frustrated and you can either buy a clue or go post a question on the forum.

Did I say forum?  Yes!  One pleasing aspect of leaping into Magicama is that, if you go to the Mulawa Dreaming website, you can join in with a whole online community of fellow puzzle solvers.  The folks that hang out there are unfailingly polite, helpful and sympathetic when you get stuck.  I don’t want to overstate it, but it’s almost as if Hewitt is reaching toward creating an MMOPG, or Massively Multiplayer Online Puzzle Game.  Magicama isn’t quite that, of course, but I would love to see Hewitt set that as his next challenge.

Magicama is available from the Mulawa Dreaming website for $19.00 for immediate download or $30 for a CD (that’s US, not Aussie dollars).  Considering the wealth of pleasant and challenging gameplay it offers, that makes purchasing the brain-bending Magicama a no-brainer.  I highly recommend it, and I’m going to be on the lookout for whatever Peter Hewitt’s next project might be.

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