Another TIGSource competition has come to an end. This one’s theme is Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book:

This was a notebook in which Lovecraft jotted down his various ideas, many of them disjointed and cryptic; most of these musings never became real stories.
You goal is to create a game based on one of these ideas. You can find them here.

The first game I checked out from the competition was Verge. It’s a puzzle platformer designed by Kyle Pulver (Bonesaw) with music by Alec Holowka (Aquaria), based on this phrase from the Commonplace Book:

27 Life and Death
Death—its desolation and horror—bleak spaces—sea-bottom—dead cities. But Life—the greater horror! Vast unheard-of reptiles and leviathans—hideous beasts of prehistoric jungle—rank slimy vegetation—evil instincts of primal man—Life is more horrible than death.

The game is a puzzle platformer that plays out a bit like a mix between Ted Lauterbach’s Visit games and the Light and Dark World mechanics in Zelda:LTTP.  You have to solve a mixture of switch and pushing-block based puzzles to find your way to the door at the end of each area.  Adding some variety to the formula is the existence of a mirror world of the dead — a dark world that you can only reach by impaling yourself into spikes or diving into bottomless lakes of dark water.  Moving between the light and dark worlds is essential to reach certain areas of each level.

The visual style of the game has a lot of richness and depth.  The character sprites have a lot of personality and the animations and fluid.  There’s a nice definition between the style of the living and dead worlds, with the former having a nice range of rich, vibrant colors, and the latter has a stark, limited palette with some special effects that match the tone well.  Holowka’s score is minimal and haunting and really ties the game together.

Verge runs on Windows machines only.  You can download it here, and you can check out all the Commonplace Book entries separately or together as a torrent  here.