Primrose First Look

Back in December, we wrote about art game developer Jason Rohrer's Passage, a one-of-a-kind meditation on human existence. Rohrer just told us about his latest project, a puzzle game for iPhone, MacOS and Windows called Primrose, which is to be launched tomorrow.

Primrose marks a bit of a departure for Rohrer, who is known mostly for developing indie games with a philosophical or political message behind them (although he is also consulting on a major commercial project for EA and Stephen Spielberg at the moment).

By contrast, Primrose is a traditional, grid-based puzzle game, albeit with a unique fusion of concepts at its core--part Reversi, part Conway's Game of Life. The idea is place colored squares on a grid in such a way that one color group is surrounded by another. This eliminates the surrounded squares, scores you points, and flips the color of the surrounding squares to the just-eliminated hue. Clever players can build high-scoring combos by setting up the squares just so and setting off a chain reaction.

The tricky part is that you're given two squares at a time to place, and after you place the first, the second can only be installed in the same row or column as the first. Plus, the game keeps added new colors to the mix every 96 moves. The game ends when you've filled in the entire board. It's very cerebral, engrossing stuff... and it's very much a Rohrer game, too, even though the subject matter is different.

As we said, Primrose is due to go live tomorrow. The price will be $2.99. Stay tuned for more coverage.