First published in E220, November 2010
The biggest hurdle any puzzle game has to get past tends to come at the very start of the journey – with its own instructions. While a majority of players can generally prod their way hesitantly through the first hectic minutes of almost any shooter, RPG or sports sim, puzzle games often exist in a sterile, directionless world of rarefied abstraction – a world of baffling multipliers and unexpected end-states. Even the most basic coloured-block matcher requires a carefully calibrated tutorial to get players moving, while the more complex among them hinge on notions sufficiently theoretical to require lengthy FAQs to explain themselves adequately. Tetris, the most natural puzzle game ever made, is the glorious, smirking exception, of course – it greets players with vistas of incompleteness that trigger a response so hardwired into animal brains that it’s somewhat staggering cats and dogs haven’t started playing it yet. But, for the most part, puzzlers make a poor first impression: they are founded on pedantic variation, built on pure ideas – and ideas often need a few minutes to properly take hold.
Chain Factor has it even worse than most of them. Area/Code’s polite pastel-coloured brain-twister has the audacity to throw numbers into the mix as well as shapes. Beyond that, its homepage is littered with dense patches of text, composed of various intimidating high-score tables and muddlesome references to the crossmedia sprawl of fiction that spawned the whole thing. Most damningly of all, if you’re playing Drop7 – the newer mobile version of the game – the instructions throw difficult words like ‘contiguous’ around with glib abandon. Has the developer gone out of its way to create a willfully niche product?
In truth, there’s nothing niche about Chain Factor whatsoever. It may take a little longer to get your head around than a Puyo Pop or a Panel De Pon, but this free browser game is still one of the purest and most potent puzzlers ever made: a bubbling brew of numerical and spatial logic driven home with a daring and dangerous twist of straight-up idiotic luck. The most common comparisons are to Lumines and Sudoku – both of which put you in the right kind of mood, with neither genuinely capturing the game’s peculiar flair and idiosyncrasy – but, in truth, Chain Factor is as irritating to try to classify as it is to attempt to describe. And all of that begs an obvious question: how could something so complex, so intricate, so niggling, turn out to be so intoxicating at the same time?
It all started with Numb3rs, a stoically unremarkable CBS mystery show about an FBI agent who likes to solve crimes with the aid of his maths genius brother. In 2007, CBS commissioned an alternate reality game (ARG) to promote the series, and a dense crossplatform web was stitched together – a web that would eventually tangle up billboards, mobile phone messages and sneaky clues hidden on internet banners and TV adverts. At the centre of all this 21st century branding busywork was a character named Spectre, who was a game designer gone bad – and at the centre of Spectre’s story was a casual game called Chain Factor.
Tricky stuff. To suit the pitch, Area/Code had to create an experience that was simple enough to get players involved, but also sufficiently deep to keep them plugging away at it in their thousands for a number of weeks, as clues to the unfolding ARG continued to spill out in the form of fake error messages and snatches of code. Described as ‘Tetris-like’ by the Wall Street Journal – the first of many not-quite-right classifications – the resulting game sees players dropping numbered discs into a 7×7 grid. When the number on the disc matches the size of the row or column it sits in, it disappears, scoring points, and steadily cracking any blank-faced grey discs that touch it, eventually revealing the numbers within. Generate chains, where one disappearing disc triggers another, and a simple multiplier kicks in. Meanwhile, after a certain number of drops, a fresh row of grey discs appears at the bottom of the screen, bumping everything closer to the top of the grid, ultimately ending the game.
While the ARG presented a game that was an experiment in ‘collaborative problem solving’, offering the promise of narrative closure and a range of different power modes for players that unlocked them, in reality the puzzler Area/Code had created was complex enough to keep players clicking away all by itself. There’s an engrossing tidal rhythm to learning the intricacies of Chain Factor – an ebb and flow that sees you first baffled, then confident you’ve unravelled all its secrets, and then baffled once again as the more obscure implications of the game’s handful of simple systems finally emerge.
The key to understanding the crux of Chain Factor’s devious nature comes fairly early on, however, as, having mastered the most basic matter of clearing discs from the play area, you realise that the game is handing out points rather reluctantly. To get the really high scores and to make any kind of impact on the leaderboards at all, you’ll need to orchestrate chains to the get the multiplier going – and that pushes you towards filling the screen with rich stacks of discs. It’s a risky strategy and one that sees you constructing a series of numerical skyscrapers, rising perilously close to the top of the playing area, in the hope that the arrival of the right disc will mean that you’ll be able to bring them all down in a splendid staggering shower of points, before things take a disastrous turn.
It’s here that Chain Factor works its unlikeliest magic, and that’s because so many of Area/Code’s rivals in the casual space have fallen into the habit of constructing puzzle games that exist in a kind of unending loop of play. In Bejewelled, say, your thousandth move in the game is likely to be fairly similar to your fifth: your score will have gone up, but your circumstances remain unchanged – the board is still filled with a pattern of jewels that is always shifting, but always essentially constant. You’re stuck in ludic limbo, and there’s no real context – no real landmarks – to allow you to get your bearings. Sure, such games often throw combo systems into the mix to provide players with more of a sense of progress, but existing at a level that’s removed from the core mechanics, they tend to be inherently artificial.
Chain Factor, however – like Tetris – is built on its combo system: it’s the spinning gear that turns at the heart of its machinery. In Tetris it’s the combo that’s ceaselessly pushing you towards holding off for the showboating four-row clearance, and in Chain Factor it’s forever tempting you into building those teetering towers of discs a little higher when you should really be keeping them as low as possible. It’s a combo system, in other words, that is fixated on undoing you; it’s a combo system that gives each round its own plot.
As a game built from a flailing strand of TV narrative, it’s oddly satisfying to discover that Chain Factor’s tempting network of score multipliers has allowed it to tell a story in its own way, then. And the story it tells, more often than not, turns out to be a swift reinvention of the Icarus myth – a tale of hope taken too far, of ambition and ingenuity fighting for balance. You pile up the discs because you think you’ll have time to bring them all down in time. You reach for the stars because you’re greedy for the bigger rewards.
And coaxing you towards the truly foolhardy behaviour, of course, is that tiny sliver of pure luck that all the best puzzle games manage to incorporate. There’s the randomised drop of the pieces, certainly, but there’s also those grey discs already lurking on screen, waiting to be cracked open – the true wildcards, which might trigger a massive avalanche of points at the moment you need it the most, or might bring your game to an abrupt conclusion as the ground shifts and your useless constructions drive themselves into the ceiling.
Chain Factor isn’t really about Numb3rs, then – and it isn’t really about numbers, either. There’s plenty of maths lurking in there, of course, but there’s so much more besides. Blending architecture and game mechanics together, Area/Code’s casual masterpiece is a strange breed of playful fable: a gentle piece of tragic mythology that – chances are – you won’t mind hearing over and over and over again.
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