This is fascinating! But I don't get it at all. :cold_sweat: I gave up on level 7 (I didn't want to skip it, because it seemed like an especially "you need to understand this mechanic to get anywhere" level), but there is clearly a lot of depth here that I can't see yet, and the overall package is very smoothly put together. Great work!

Very cool mechanic and love your interpretation of the theme. It's nice in a puzzle game where you can undo so there's freedom to experiment to find solutions, the limited capacity adds a constraint for challenge and to have the stack of moves be a part of the puzzle and visualizing it as you did is awesome. The graphics and audio make everything clear. Good job!

Really good submission, it took me a bit to wrap my head around it, but once i did it was very enjoyable. Room 7 was genius. The graphics and audio are nothing too crazy, but they don't detract from the experience. I don't really see the theme worked into this game, but it's a good game nonetheless

Room 10 is my favourite, very nice solution


I agree with the previous commentator. I liked the game as a whole.

I spent a while trying to read the description here, being pretty confused, but the in-game tutorial seems pretty great, it might be less confusing to get started if your description here were just shorter! I will admit I came back to review the first image in your description here a couple times, though.

Great game, really cool, fresh idea! I also got stuck on level 7 for a while until I accidentally discovered the new mechanic, maybe that could have been telegraphed a little better (maybe a level where the player can't possible reach the stairs without the stack getting in the way). I've made it through the first 12 levels now, will have to come back later and do some more!

Cool game and impressive technical system.

Argh this seems really cool and up my alley, but I can't figure out how to get past the second level. I feel like I'm missing something. How do I manipulate the stack to do anything interesting? Virtual Undo seems like the most important thing, but I can't seem to get it to do anything different from real undo.

@impbox I'd recommend skipping the second level, you won't be missing anything. It was just supposed to be a standard sokoban-style puzzle where you could potentially fill the stack, I didn't mean to make it as difficult as I did.

Ok, this is interesting, so much that it took me a while to understand it. One of the biggest problems I had was that I thought the turn was coded from above to below (movement, crates), while it's in the opposite direction, I think this was caused by level 3 tutorial (the first value...), because we are used to read in that direction. Once got it I solved (for the moment) half of the levels, which are really impressive, different and surprising, the other half will take me a couple more days. But once again, impressive entry!

I'm being honest here, i think i couldn't quite grasp how it worked and got stuck on level 5. I tend to study the behaviour and formulate rules in my head, instead of reading rules and trying to extrapolate the behaviour. So i only fly over the rules - this might be stupid, but that's how my brain likes to work. This felt a bit problematic, because i had little room to do so. On Level 4 i learned that boxes with the same index are connected by virtual undo. What remained unclear is, why the movement direction has a number - i'd expect it plays a role, but i couldn't find any mechanic. On level 5 i wasn't able to produce any type of "interconnection via virtual undo", but i expect that i need it there (as this is the main mechanic and level 4 already used it). I couldn't find any combination of movement or multiple box pushes that "did" something.

I went back to check the rules, but didn't find anything new or contradictory, so i guess i am missing something.

Nice game!
I always loved sokoban style games! and the "fill stack" mechanic was a nice addition

@rongo-matane Below is an explanation of what the level is trying to teach and then a description of the solution. I've encoded it using rot13 so that anyone reading can choose how much they want to reveal.

Guvf znl frrz havaghvgvir, ohg yriry 5 qbrfa'g erdhver nal haqbvat, gur ernfba vg vf nsgre yriry 4 vf whfg orpnhfr vg erdhverf n orggre haqrefgnaqvat bs ubj gur fgnpx shapgvbaf. Gur checbfr bs gur yriry vf gb rzcunfvmr gung gur fgnpx pncnpvgl vf abg rdhvinyrag gb n zbir pbhagre, naq gung fbzr zbirf erdhver yrff fgnpx fcnpr guna bguref.

Chfuvat nyy guerr obkrf gb gur yrsg tvirf lbh gur bcgvzny zbir pbhag, ohg gur fgnpx unf gb fgber nyy guerr obk vaqvprf, juvpu svyyf vg dhvpxyl. Guvf zrnaf lbh npghnyyl jnag gb zbir bar bs gur guerr obkrf bhg bs gur jnl naq gura chfu gur bgure gjb gb gur yrsg, juvpu nqq zbirf ohg fnirf fgnpx fcnpr.

My brain hurts haha
That's a super cool mechanic, I was thinking about *stacks* when I was brainstorming for an idea, and I'm really glad you managed to make this idea come to life, love your submission

i've spent the longest time playing this submission out of any of them, by far. this is so incredibly unique and innovative, i've never seen a puzzle game with mechanics like these.
I'm super into difficult puzzle games like this, but i might have to give it a break for now haha. I got to level 24, after several hours. ill probably come back to it eventually!
but in any case, really great game!

Seeing the screenshots and and stuff posted I'd love to try this game. I'll have to come back when I have access to a windows PC. :smile: Currently stuck on the road with a macbook, but I will definitely circle back when I can.

edit: just saw that there is a web version. Playing through now :smiley:

Wow that is super impressive. The concept took a bit to get my head around it but after I was able to push around what I thought was just the UI and replace parts of the stack. Just wow! Like baba is you + a Zachtronics game.

Gameplay was fun ) Good luck!.

Very innovative take on the theme! This is definitely the type of game that gets stuck on your brain :) Great work!

Very good game - kept me thinking.

One of the cleverest Puzzle Games I've ever seen, wow, just wow. Incredible idea.

BUT I think it would be less alien to some of the other commenters if there were Arrows inside the Stack, instead of 1234 Numbers - I know, it would break the Boxes dynamic, but these could have Arrows too - or NESW (North, East, South, West) could've worked too.
It took quite some time until I understood what was going on but once I got it, it was amazing.
Very clever Puzzles. I also liked the virtual/real undo (which I noticed at Lvl 14 xD quite late, I know).

Also I would add a "Press Z/Backspace/Shift" text when the player is stuck outside the map.

I would keep going with it, it is really clever and your puzzles are well designed - haven't finished it yet but I will do so. 10/10 brain-melting fun. :D

Great puzzle game. A little struggle with the beginning guide. But the levels after that is so cool. I got much fun in playing time, and really want to play your next game. Thank you.

(Still trying to pass all levels yet.)

And I really want to learn how to make levels complex with the simple settings.

This was a crazy mind bender. I had to skip a couple levels which I came back for, and ended up completing all levels up until 12. It started to get pretty crazy when you introduced pushable stack blocks. I felt pretty satisfied with the solution to 11, which is when I think I finally properly understood the game.

The audio and visuals aided the experience quite well, and the puzzles were pretty cool. Some sort of music might have been nice, and also some keyboard control of menus would be nice too since the gameplay uses the keyboard.

Overall it's a really solid and complete game, with a really cool and unique mechanic. You could totally polish this up and sell it! Well done.

This game is incredible! It made me love it and hate it at the same time. I only finished the first 10 levels, but will definitely come back later to complete it. For a little complaint, I personally prefer pressing Escape to take me back to the level select, not the main menu. Also switching from fullscreen mode to window mode crashed the game (this happened twice), you might want to look into the code.

@notan-lemon Thanks for playing! Was this from the menu or when switching in a level, and did you happen to save the error message from the crash? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to reproduce it on either version.

"Crash" might not have been the right word. When I started the game, I pressed the screen mode button twice in the menu before going to the level select, and on the second press it didn't go back to the window mode (the default was window mode) and it looked frozen. alt+tab, win+tab and ctrl+shift+esc didn't work, but win+l worked and it successfully locked the computer. When I signed back in, the game was closed by Norton claiming that SONAR.ProcHijack!g45 was detected by SONAR.

I don't know what has changed since then but I can't reproduce it now either.

@stevenjmiller ah i see, thank you for the explanation! I played some more levels and can see this as an innovation winner, the mechanics are really unqiue. For my taste a bit too "deep", my rule of thumb being: can i solve this in my head, without trying moves? Maybe you can :D
But i can see that this is perfect for thinky puzzle gamers ;)

PS: i just wanted to recheck because i thought that the teching of level 5 already was taught in a previous level, but i got an error in the browser:
5Push Stack.js?EUPYB=1411980226:2364 Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'length' of undefined
at _Yq2 (Push Stack.js?EUPYB=1411980226:2364)
at HTMLCanvasElement._tr2 (Push Stack.js?EUPYB=1411980226:2374)

@rongo-matane Thanks, I'll have to check this out, though I am admittedly fairly clueless when it comes to html5 debugging. Levels 2 and 3 are a bit similar to 5, the main difference is that they can both be solved by using the fewest possible moves.

@stevenjmiller It has to be an issue with the local storage. I cleared it, then it was fine again. Sounds like a corrupted save to me. The behaviour is very strange though. Everytime i refresh the page, the error re-appears. If i delete the push stack entry form the local browser storage, i can launch the game without the error. The curious thing is, that i still see the levels i completed as completed, instead of all empty as i'd expect.

This is the entry that might cause the issue and gets re-created.
[Level]
0="1"
1="1"
2="1"
3="1"
4="1"
5="1"
6="1"
7="1"
8="0"
9="0"
10="0"
11="0"
12="0"
13="0"
14="0"
15="0"
16="0"
17="0"
18="0"
19="0"
20="0"
21="0"
22="0"
23="0"
24="0"
[Settings]
Window="0"
Sound="1"

Wow. The game made my mind explode. I always enjoy a good puzzle game and this one really makes you think. I honestly did not really see much of a difference between the "Real" vs "Virtual" undos. I'm just I'm just dumb and missed the obvious. I did see once or twice where one would like reset a large chunk of the stack while the other only ever went back once. So, I mean, I get what it did (though I said not) lol but what I mean is that I failed to use it properly to solve the puzzle. I figured that occasionally I would need to use one over the other to get enough space in stack to solve the puzzle but my brain was simply too dumb for this game. Still, I think it's a solid entry...maybe dumb it down for the first 3 levels to give me a false sense of "Hey, I might be smart" :up:

@rongo-matane The save file is fine, it turns out I get the same error message whenever I load a save as well, I just had to go into developer tools to see it (I tested it on Chrome and Firefox, they both just let me keep playing). I checked a couple of games that other people made using the same game engine and the same error message shows up. The issue seems to be with how the engine handles saves in web builds if you still treat them as ini files in the code. I'll see if I can find a fix later, though I'm not sure if it would be plausible without making everyone lose their saves.

@prodigalson Thanks for playing! The real undo isn't actually necessary for solving any puzzles, it is just there in case you make a mistake or get stuck and don't want to fully restart. And yes, I don't know what I was thinking when I made those first few levels, they are needlessly difficult.

[Thanks for submitting this to the stream!](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1007626304?t=01h28m27s)

I think you have a REALLY cool nugget of a game here! The boys and I lost our minds when we discovered how to interact with the stack UI. That was a really awesome twist.

A big challenge with puzzle games is designing levels that are both easy for the player to understand but also challenging for them to figure out. I think if you spent some time really refining how you communicate your mechanics to the player, a larger group of people could really get a kick out of this one!

Every time, enjoys your game.

Haha, that was amazing! I was scared at first because stacks are not my strongest suit, but the trick ended up being really fun. Didn't finish but had a good chuckle at some of the later tricks. Super neat!

This game is amazing! There were some later levels that I skipped due to not wanting to do the math to make sure the stack ended up correctly, but the core concept is beautifully confusing.