Flywrench
All you need to know about Flywrench is that one, it is one of the hardest games you will ever play and two,
when you finally complete it, you will feel like a god among mortals. It's hard to describe what it is exactly. You pilot a ship that is a flywrench and you navigate through traps in solar systems. The story really isn't the strongest part of the game but the bizarre text in between levels serve as a sort of entertaining intermission.
The controls are very simple. When you press up, your flywrench flaps its wings once, turning into a red vertical line until you release the key. Holding down turns your ship into a spinning green line. It loses altitude and can bounce off the yellow walls of the level. Pressing left or right makes your ship glide in that direction in its default white horizontal state.
The catch is that the controls are "slippery" which makes the flywrench insanely difficult to control. Pressing up propels your ship a short distance upwards but when you press the same key again, it drives the ship upwards with a much greater force. This means that it is impossible to control your movement precisely. There isn't a "safe" way of playing, i.e. tapping a key a few times to nudge the ship's movement. Instead, you're expected to go with the ship's inertia, timing your keys right to achieve your intended trajectory.
Adding to the game's difficulty are the differently colored gates in the levels. A green gate could only be passed through if your ship is green. Therefore, holding the up key gets you through red gates, spinning the ship gets your through green gates and gliding gets you through white gates. When the levels have a bunch of different gates, the player has to quickly decide which ship behavior to use and switch to it.
Add in spinning cross-shaped obstacles, mud slides that force your ship downwards, switch-activated gates to the narrow passages in the levels and you have a game that is fantastically challenging. It takes more than a few tries to finish a level but fortunately, your ship is instantly respawned at the starting point when it crashes, saving you time from wiping your tears. It's amazing how much you will learn after dying a few times -- it seems as though your mind subconsciously learns to time your keys slightly faster or slower to navigate around that seemingly impossible corner. And when you finally complete a level on your 50th attempt, the satisfaction is immense. Pat yourself on the back and do a little victory dance on your swivel chair because you deserve it!
The very minimalistic graphical style doesn't distract from the gameplay which is the main focus anyway. Adding more might actually detract from the gameplay since it relies on colors and lines to define boundaries. Flywrench feels like a unique, almost alien experience. The up/down/left/right keys are the most commonly used keys in games to control movement. Here, the controls move the ship but not in the way that is familiar to the player. It takes a kind of re-learning of the controls which I find gives the game its unique edge.
-- Benjamin
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