There’s a burgeoning subgenre of PC games born of every developer’s second love: programming. Double Fine’s deconstructive Zelda-like Hack ‘n’ Slash might not have lived up to its prototype, and hacking heist adventure Quadrilateral Cowboy is still a little way off – but we’ve already got Glitchspace, a “cyberspace playground” with reprogrammable geometry.
The programming-puzzler has just hit alpha 2.0 on Steam Early Access, having been totally rebuilt with a two hour story mode campaign.
A freeform, first-person game with the vibe of Fez, Glitchspace has its players bouncing about an abstract world clutching a visual programming interface called Null. Using Null (The Null?), they can edit the environment to make it traversable, building programs and learning key coding concepts as they progress.
Glitchspace’s previous versions still exist as legacy modes – but the game has been utterly transformed since development began two years ago.
“We’ve been pretty quiet with Glitchspace for the past year due to the complete rebuild,” say developers Space Budgie. “However, expect regular updates to the game moving forward with new levels, programming concepts and an enhanced sandbox mode introduced!”
Final release has been pushed into 2016 – but you can play now on Steam. Do you think you might?