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Ending

FlashPuzzle

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    Overview

    Ending is a puzzle game about movement and death. Aaron Steed made it as a single player, turn based game for people who like board games, chess and roguelikes.

    You step one square at a time in the four cardinal directions, and each step is a turn that sets every piece around you moving. Each piece follows its own fixed pattern, so the puzzle is working out who will strike where before you commit to a move.

    Puzzle rooms are limited to one grid with one exit, while adventure rooms are journeys between chains of rooms. Every game state is a set of flags on a 2D grid, which keeps the scope small; as the source puts it, no good puzzle ever needed clutter. An editor lets you build and rearrange rooms of your own.

    Made by
    Aaron Steed (st33d)
    Released
    2013

    Controls guide

    Playing

    KeyAction
    Arrows/WASDStep one square; every step is one turn
    H/J/K/LStep left, down, up or right
    8/4/6/2Step up, left, right or down with the number row
    ClickStep toward the side of the screen you click (the screen is split along its diagonals)
    RRestart the room
    Ctrl/ShiftToggle check view, which marks the squares where you would be attacked
    PSave a screenshot as a PNG file

    Menus

    KeyAction
    ClickChoose Puzzle, Adventure or Editor, then a numbered level
    ClickThe gear in the top-right corner opens quit, reset, check view, sound and fullscreen buttons

    Cheatsheet

    Rules

    Food clock
    48 steps, drawn on your sprite; each step costs one
    Kill beside you
    Refills 8 food, up to 48
    Out of food
    You turn to stone
    Attack
    Step into a piece to destroy it
    Enemy range
    Only pieces within 5 squares of you act
    Puzzle mode
    60 rooms, numbered from 00
    Adventure mode
    Your best is the fewest turns to reach the ending

    Pieces

    Mover
    Chases you, but only along its marked axes (across, up and down, or all four)
    Turner
    Must rotate to face a direction before it can move or strike that way
    Trap
    Never moves; strikes anything that stands on its marked side
    Generator
    Spawns a copy of its piece on a timer
    Bomb
    Explodes when destroyed and takes its neighbours with it
    Ally
    Copies each step you take
    Swap block
    A wall you can trade places with
    Door
    Break it to open the next room in Adventure

    Tips

    1. The game reads one key at a time: if two direction keys are held together, nothing happens, so tap one direction per turn.
    2. Pieces more than five squares away do not act at all, so you can study a room from a distance and only wake the enemies you are ready for.
    3. Turners spend a turn rotating before they can come at you, so approach them from behind or the side and strike first.
    4. Kills made right next to you refill 8 points of food. In Adventure, pick fights that keep the clock topped up rather than running past everything.
    5. Turn on check view (Ctrl or Shift) when a room gets crowded: it marks every empty square that would leave you open to an attack on the enemies' turn.

    Secrets

    Slaughterhouse-Five lines

    Clear the last puzzle room and the game signs off with "poo-tee-weet?"; resetting an Adventure run from the gear menu shows "everything was beautiful and nothing hurt". Both are lines from Kurt Vonnegut's novel.