Bloxorz

Bloxorz
Developer(s)	DX Interactive
Publisher(s)
Director(s)
Producer(s)
Designer(s)
Programmer(s)
Artist(s)
Writer(s)
Composer(s)
Series
Engine
Platform(s)	Web browser
Release	21 June 2007 (2007-06-21)
Genre(s)	Puzzle
Mode(s)	Single-player
Cabinet
Arcade system
CPU
Sound
Display

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Bloxorz is a puzzle video game created by Damien Clarke of DX Interactive and released in 2007 as a free Adobe Flash browser game. The player rolls a rectangular block across tiled platforms, attempting to drop it upright through a square hole without falling. Across its 33 levels, the game introduces switches, bridges, fragile tiles and devices that divide the block into two independently controlled pieces.

Contemporary reviews discussed the game's spatial puzzles and simple premise. In 2009, GameSpot compared the PlayStation 3 game Cuboid with Bloxorz, identifying similarities in their mechanics. Bloxorz has also been studied in research on computational complexity and automated puzzle solving.

Gameplay

Bloxorz takes place on platforms assembled from square tiles. The player controls a block with dimensions of 1 × 1 × 2, which occupies one tile when standing upright and two when lying on its side. Movement consists of tipping the block onto another face or rolling it along a rectangular side, changing its position and orientation. The objective is to reach the exit hole in an upright position; a move that leaves the block unsupported causes it to fall from the platform. The arrow keys control movement, and falling restarts the level.

Switches alter bridges connecting parts of a level. Soft switches can be activated by any part of the block, whereas heavy switches, marked with a cross, require it to stand upright. Depending on the switch, activation can repeatedly toggle a bridge or permanently create a route. The block does not have to remain on a switch to maintain the resulting bridge configuration. Orange tiles collapse under an upright block but can support it when its weight is distributed across two tiles.

Other switches split the block into two cubes and transport them to separate positions. The cubes can be moved independently, with the space bar selecting the active piece, and rejoin when placed next to one another. The smaller pieces can activate soft switches but cannot operate heavy switches or complete a level by entering the exit individually. They can also travel over orange tiles without breaking them.

There are 33 levels. Each has a password that allows the player to return to it in a later session; the original interface accepts six-digit codes through a stage-loading option. Upon completion of the game, a results screen displays the number of moves, elapsed time and number of failures.

Release

Clarke, who also created JetSpeed, Silversphere and Missile Game 3D, developed Bloxorz under the DX Interactive name. The game was released on 21 June 2007. On Albino Blacksheep, Clarke was credited under his username Roboman. Wired directed readers to that site's version later that month.

Reception

Jay is Games praised the execution of Bloxorz's simple premise and the additional puzzle possibilities created by splitting the block. The review described the game as engaging and addictive, but criticized the absence of automatic progress saving, while welcoming its password system. Wired highlighted the need to alternate between rolling the block on its side and tipping it end over end.

Writing in Felix, the student newspaper of Imperial College London, Azfarul Islam emphasized the spatial awareness required to navigate the platforms and their switches and bridges. He praised the game's replayability and suggested that solving its puzzles with friends was particularly enjoyable. Microsiervos gave the game five out of five for enjoyment and the same rating for difficulty, describing its later levels as especially challenging but completable.

In his review of Cuboid, GameSpot's Kevin VanOrd identified Bloxorz as its apparent inspiration, noting that both games used the same core mechanics and similar switches. He questioned Cuboid's US$10 price because Bloxorz was available free in a browser, while acknowledging that Cuboid offered more puzzles and more intricate board and switch configurations.

Academic research

Bloxorz was used as an assessment task in a study of cognitive training published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2014. Pauline L. Baniqued and colleagues classified it as a reasoning task and assessed performance by the last level completed. Clarke modified the game for the study, which used a locally running version compatible with testing in an MRI environment.

In a paper published in the proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Algorithms and Complexity, Tom C. van der Zanden and Hans L. Bodlaender proved that determining whether a generalized Bloxorz level containing switches and trapdoors is solvable is PSPACE-complete. Their model considers levels of arbitrary size, rather than only the game's fixed set of puzzles. The result remains valid when all trapdoors begin open or all begin closed. The authors also examined variants with a cubic block and single-use tiles; the latter are an extension absent from the original game.

A 2019 paper in Procedia Computer Science used the first level of Bloxorz to compare breadth-first search, depth-first search and A* search in an automated solver. Tahani Q. Alhassan, Shefaa S. Omar and Lamiaa A. Elrefaei compared solution lengths, execution times and the numbers of search nodes explored. Breadth-first search and A* found shortest paths in both test cases, while the length of a depth-first search solution depended on the order in which moves were explored.

External links

• Bloxorz at Albino Blacksheep

This article "Bloxorz" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Bloxorz. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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