Shift
Shift is one of those rare puzzle games that makes me feel like I’m not ANY good at it, and yet I’m always almost good at it. It’s like when you can get one side of a Rubik’s Cube solved, but just one side. It makes my brain feel… something good and bad in equal measure.
You have a 4x4 grid that repeatedly refills with a random assortment of black or white squares, and you control a little robot that moves around the outside. You can “shift” the entire row forwards or backwards using the A or B buttons, and your goal is to get four of one color in a row. Those matched blocks clear, and more blocks drop in. If you’re lucky, the new blocks make other four-in-a-row sets and you can get a combo. You also need to build up streaks for higher scores by shifting without missing a match.
There’s an energy bar that decreases when you make a move without making a match, and it increases when you do make a match. It’ll refill to the max if you clear two sets at once. I found that the energy bar is juuuuust forgiving enough to keep you right on the edge of defeat. Even though there’s no time limit on anything, the constantly changing energy levels always make it feel more dramatic than just moving squares around.
The biggest problem I had was not understanding the game at first. The tutorial is hidden in the menu screen instead of just popping up automatically like in Generations, so I didn’t even see it. I thought it was just dropping me in blind! My first few games, I had these huge blocks of matching colors that wouldn’t clear and I was just like… what am I doing wrong? But then I got it and wow, what smart design choices. Simple and tight, it’s so easy to lose many minutes to Shift. Eventually I did check out the tutorial and found you can wrap around the blocks by using a unit of energy? I got almost 10,000 points while dropping combos all over the place; just imagine when I’m unleashed with knowledge of all the game’s secrets.
The only real problem with the game is that there’s no difficulty escalation as you progress. The amount of and ratio of white/black blocks seems constant forever, so once you really get the hang of it, it’s just a matter of how long you can play before it’s time for dinner. Generations has a finite amount of space on the wall, and the random nature of the next picture you get means that even if you’re doing well, you can run out of space quick once you have too many differing generations on the screen at once. With something like Tetris, the blocks keep falling faster until you can no longer keep up. In Shift, it’s a marathon, but the scenery never changes. It’s great to zen out to it, but eventually you’ll be like, “Oh, I get it.” But maybe that’s enough? Eager to see what the sequel brings to the table later this week… and I’ll make sure to watch the tutorial first next time.
(Originally released June 15, 2022, on Itch, with the redesigned version launching June 6, 2023, on Catalog. Also on iPhone! Copy provided by developer.)