Crayon Physics Deluxe seems obvious in retrospect.

Driving to work a few days ago, listening to NPR, I hear an interview with this Finnish computer science student who developed a game as part of some experimental gaming project, that it was developed in five days and released under Creative Commons, and that it had just been expanded with level-creation tools and released commercially. Sounding a little sheepish, designer Petri Purho explains how his mother didn’t get that the childlike drawings were part of the style, how he dropped out of school for six months to continue its development, and when that wasn’t enough, he stayed out for another six months, until a year and eight months had passed. As a multimedia arts major with a focus on 3D design and animation, I know exactly what a one-man design operation can be like — that rabbit hole just keeps going and going. Intrigued, I went home and tried the demo. Six hours later, I was watching the full game’s credits roll.

The game’s origins are so easily understandable it almost seems redundant to explore them. It lies at the intersection of three very clear phenomena: the popularity of stylus games (particularly thanks to the DS), the experimental idealism of independent programming, and an innocent, minimalist aesthetic, often with ambient music, that’s gradually becoming more and more prevalent. For days I struggled to remember what this combination of styles reminded me of, before I rediscovered Knytt and Within a Deep Forest (which fulfill two of the three, the second of which also involves getting a ball to difficult places). The expression of these three concepts in one experience is so obvious it feels silly to explain them, particularly since I’m doing so well after-the-fact. The game came out in June of 2007, yet Penny Arcade did a comic and news post about it last Friday, coincident with the NPR interview, commercial release, and the advent of its word-of-mouth popularity.

This isn’t to scoff at people for not noticing the game until now, as I’d be included in that group, but to make the point that Crayon Physics Deluxe is getting Big, and think briefly about what that means. Penny Arcade is as reliable and invaluable as anyone about noticing overlooked gems (they did actually mention this one last summer) in an increasingly “corporatized” industry, where you’d better have a name-brand or you’re nobody. But it sometimes seems like these are the only two expressions of videogames as a medium: the obscenely high-profile, full-rounded experience, or the minimalist “indie” game, made by one guy in Finland, with a few people providing the music or artistic polish. Thus Crayon Physics Deluxe is really the perfect analogy for the industry, a metaphor for the little game that blows up big. If you’re not already “in”, having worked your way through the trenches, you’d better hope your little crayon physics engine is what the whole world spontaneously realizes has been sorely missing from their lives. Otherwise you’re just treading water somewhere in the hazy middle.

But enough cynicism and smirky bitterness (for now). How is it?

I suppose the best adjective for Crayon Physics Deluxe is ‘playable’. Not in the sense that term is usually tossed around, as condescending faint praise, but in the purest sense of the word. It’s a minimalist game in the finest tradition, one that hooks you at the beginning and gently pulls you all the way through it. The game establishes its few complexities at a gradual pace, getting most of them out of the way in the first few islands and dropping one or two smaller ones later on, and then lets you get on with getting on.

Your job is to get a ball to a star by drawing shapes, which obey physical laws. As soon as you finish drawing, the shape is affected by gravity and falls (you can’t draw in momentum, just position). Everything you draw has weight and moves entirely like it should — if you draw a line ending in a blob that line is going to be weighed down by its blob end. If you drop a box shape on a long shape hanging over a ledge, it’ll bounce the opposite end into the air approximating the comparative weight and position of impact. You can delete anything you’ve created by right-clicking it and scribble as much as you want anywhere on the screen. But you can’t directly influence the star or the ball (except by giving it a light push left or right).

You’ll be introduced to pivot points, swinging one object around another and reinforced pivots that allow you to make fixed shapes for leverage. You’ll draw ropes between objects, and later encounter respawning rocket shapes that fire off at high speed when something impacts them. Many levels incorporate one or many of these gameplay elements by default, and can’t be erased. Many levels have objects affected by unseen fields pushing or pulling against them. And that about covers everything, leaving the rest entirely up to you.

The game’s biggest strength is also its biggest potential weakness. Everything is governed by the physics engine. Anything you can do in one level, you can usually do in another level. This may lead to what can’t really (but still will) be called “cheating” — brute-forcing the physics engine or performing the same maneuver over and over again in a variety of different level layouts. I realized somewhere around the fourth island that I was repeatedly relying on a solution that had worked well for me whenever nothing else immediately suggested itself. There are one or two solutions that work for 60-80% of the puzzles. Can this reasonably be considered a flaw? One of the beautiful things about the game is that it doesn’t force specific puzzle solutions on you. Purho hasn’t worked tirelessly to weed out everything except for one or two preferred methods. And he hasn’t, thank God, added fire or spikes or death-upon-contact surfaces of any kind apart from having the ball go off-screen (after which it respawns within seconds).

But it’s a legitimate complaint from a practical standpoint. There are gamers who, realizing they have the ability to overcome obstacles with a certain method, will use that method exclusively throughout the game. Thus according to them, the game is broken, or at least monotonous. I shouldn’t have been able to do what I did, but because I could, it’s a sign of bad design. And that’s not entirely unfair, especially in a game where you can fill the entire screen with scribbling, which then has physical weight all its own.

But what’s the alternative? A fixed, rigidly playtested singular path from beginning to end? Puzzles that constantly roadblock all but a few approved solutions, like the invisible hand of the developer, waiting to swat you for trying something he didn’t think of? One of the joys of Crayon Physics Deluxe is that the restrictions in its puzzles aren’t overbearing, that the framework of its gameplay doesn’t keep popping into my field of vision when I play it. I like the freedom of its level layout, even if you come across a certain type of trick, as I did, that works on a variety of levels after only a few strategy adjustments. It’s a game that seems fine with anything that works. Whatever I come up with that gets the ball to the star was the correct solution. Most of the time, it doesn’t have its own preferred strategy, and when a game manages to do that without losing too much in the tradeoff, I greatly appreciate it.

With the built-in campaign done, I haven’t been back to check out user created levels or to make my own yet, but for now, I’m satisfied with the experience I got out of Crayon Physics Deluxe. With its sudden rise in visibility, there’s inevitably going to be a war of expectations, and I have little patience for that, so just try out the demo and see if that’s something you’d like more of.

And after you do, take an hour or an afternoon or a span of a few days to check out some of the games that maybe haven’t managed to explode onto your radar.

Score

B+