Aliens!

Prompt 5: Describe how the images, sounds, and writing change your experience of a puzzle.

The game Aliens! Communicates its rules and goals by ordering levels by increasing difficulty in both terms of understanding the rules and goals of the game and actually how to execute the rules in order to reach the goal. The game’s first level limits you to having to move the space ship over the cow which allows the player to realize the rule of picking up the cow. Moreover, it also allows you to see the rule that you start picking up the cow before you are one space above it. In other words, the cow starts hovering towards the spaceship as the spaceship moves down instead of having to place the spaceship exactly one space above the cow in order to pick it up. Also, through the linear progression of the level to the right with the large open space as well as the fact that there is only one more sprite in the level, you realize that the goal is to put the cow in the barn. You can also put the cow into the barn multiple ways due to the space above the barn, in which you can either put the cow in from the top or the side which communicates the rule of how to put the cow into the barn. Altogether, more complex rules are uncovered through later, harder levels; however, these rules, such as the rule of the teleportation box, are presented similarly to the first level through limiting the players movement in order to force them to undergo a teleportation and understand the rule. Overall, this direction of attention is very profound through the way the levels are built and these restrictions on the movement. I would say that without this limitation and more freedom in the level, it would be a tiny bit harder to understand the rules and furthermore the goal at first. I would say that the most intriguing aspect of the game is the sound. The noise that is made when the spaceship grabs a cow and is moving upwards makes me want to keep moving the spaceship around and furthermore progress through the levels to continue to drive it. Without this sound, I would definitely feel a lack of feedback based on my physical inputs to the game and would for sure not enjoy playing the puzzles as much. Lastly, I would say that this game does not have any explicit story as there is simply an alien putting the cows back into the barn. I mean, maybe there could be a story that this alien is a good alien and feels bad for the cows, so instead of stealing them, there is this sort of role reversal and good samaritan aspect of the game that shows this good side of the alien in the spaceship. I would not necessarily say that I feel like a good alien playing this game though, especially without the explicitness of a concrete story throughout solving the puzzles, which leads me to not feel any identification with the game, alien, or spaceship.