Blockage

Blockage is a game where you play as a snake in a box. As you move towards the exit you leave a trail behind you. In the next room, that trail will still be there, only it will be made of solid blocks and is one of the tools you need to navigate your snake to the next room. You can backtrack to the previous room at any time if you find you need to redo old work.

My opinion: The concept here is pretty cool, but the game itself is very frustrating. The game shows you the layout of the next room so you can plan for that, but what it doesn't show you is the layout of rooms ahead. This means that more than once you'll find out that you need to completely redo 4 or 5 levels because otherwise you're not able to get to the exit. There's no real way to plan for this and there are quite a few puzzles where you essentially have a completely open room with no obstacles where the trail you leave only really matters a few rooms down the line, which is quite frustrating since it's simply not possible to figure those out on the first try short of a lucky guess. The other big issue I have with this game is it's controls. I understand that its hard to make decent controls for a grid based game as seen diagonally, but none of the options are really any good. Using the arrow keys is frustrating because you'll probably go the wrong way plenty of times since your brain has trouble reassigning "up" to "up and to the left". The default keys are E, R, D, and F, which have the benefit of actually being in the right alignment for the game but have the disadvantage of being super cramped and really hard to use (at least on my keyboard). I think I'd love this game if I had the option to try out different key bindings until I found one that worked and if they showed me all the rooms ahead of time so I could plan properly, but without those features the game is too frustrating for me to really recommend.

Blockage is by Gabo Gaete, John Nesky, and Ashley Zeldin. You can play it here.