Lid Astray

Out of all the inkJam 2023 games, this one is my favorite by far. It features a wildly innovative mechanic: you turn on your webcam, and through some facial recognition magic it detects when you blink and factors that into the gameplay. The setting is a dream labyrinth of sorts, and the world changes whenever you blink. A pond melts and freezes, a north-south path lined with skulls becomes an east-west path lined with lanterns, and so on.

All the overlapping worlds brought to mind Dual Transform by Andrew Plotkin, another game where you can navigate parallel versions of reality. But Dual Transform relied entirely on good ol' parser commands, while the blinking in this game is (I'm sorry Andrew Plotkin) a hundred times cooler.

Seriously, words cannot express how cool this is. The experience of seeing something different every time you close your eyes and re-open them is incredibly surreal, and really sells the shifting dreamscape where you can never be sure what's under your feet. There's even music and background animations to build up the atmosphere. For a jam game, this has an crazy level of polish.

The puzzles are simple, but make great use of the mechanic. You'll quickly learn when to blink and when not to blink as you navigate the labyrinth, and balancing your intentional blinks with your unintentional blinks is great fun. A whole new dimension of control given to the player.

Quibbles I had: the obstacle in the fourth challenge killed me three times (you'll know it when you see it), and every time you die you return to the beginning and have to do everything again. Making it past the fourth challenge, I was excited to reach the fifth and then promptly died another unceremonious death. There's apparently a good ending, but I don't feel like navigating the labyrinth again to find it. The abrupt ending is probably an artifact of the time limit, since this was made in (only!) 72 hours. If an expanded version's ever released, I'll be sure to check it out.

TLDR: highly recommend.

Playtime: about 10 minutes

(If you have issues with the blink detection, make sure you're close enough to the webcam! You can also simulate blinking with the spacebar, but the experience isn't quite the same without the camera.)