Tandis review: The ultimate geometry-based puzzle game

The puzzle-gaming style of “making shapes out of formulation” is presently dominated by a single designer. 5 years after his last sensational stab at the genre, Iranian-born game-maker Mahdi Bahrami has returned with an much more spectacular—and, at occasions, hair-pullingly tough—puzzling masterpiece.

Tandis, out this week on each Steam and as a direct, DRM-free purchase for $15 (quickly on sale for $13.49), is arguably the best execution of high-level math I’ve ever seen in a PC sport. Even higher, its problem is disguised within the type of a tinker-toy. Hand this to any younger, budding mathematician, and watch them get hooked on what’s finally a superb edutainment gem in disguise.

Axes and allies

The great thing about Tandis comes from the way it turns the formulaic manipulation of X, Y, and Z axes right into a gaming mechanic. Typical schooling about mathematical formulation revolves round plotting resolution outcomes on a 2D grid to see what shapes they generate. That is positive sufficient—although doing this requires the mathematical grokking of a components itself. However what should you might do this type of factor a lot sooner, and in 3D, by dragging shapes onto an simply understood sequence of grids, then watching them rework into improbable new shapes in response?

In each Tandis puzzle, gamers are handed a single geometric form (generally with full 3D properties, generally as a flat 2D polygon), then are proven the puzzle’s resolution, which is a special geometric form. Let’s begin with a easy instance. Within the sport’s first puzzle, your beginning form (which you’ll decide up) is one-fourth the amount of the “resolution” block (which you can’t contact).

Choose the form up along with your mouse, then place it on a grid fabricated from black-and-white squares. To the correct of that, a brand new form seems on a grid of greater black-and-white squares, and the ensuing form is twice as giant on all axes—which, coincidentally sufficient, is how a lot greater the right-side black-and-white squares are. (Mathematically, that is a easy multiplication of all axes’ values.) You’ll be able to decide up both form, and at this level, the bigger one completely matches the answer form. Choose it up and transfer it to a podium subsequent to the answer and Tandis will scan your submission to verify that its measurement, form, and curves are shut sufficient.

The subsequent puzzle hints to how bushy Tandis will ultimately grow to be. Its left-side grid is fabricated from black-and-white squares, whereas the opposite grid is filled with squiggly traces. Put a right-angled form onto the left-side grid, and it’ll come out of the right-side grid with its X and Y axes in equally squiggly kind. (Mathematically, we’re taking a look at a parabolic equation utilized to a single axis right here.)

From right here on out, Tandis solely turns into extra intense, and its problem potential is maybe finest summarized by the beneath assortment of shape-manipulation GIFs, as made by Bahrami.

If a puzzle has a number of grids on its desk, you’ll be able to put a form onto any of them to generate manipulated shapes on the opposite grids. Use your mouse to carry any a type of new shapes, then transfer it onto one other grid for the sake of a recursive components utility. If one grid transforms a 2D form right into a 3D donut, you’ll be able to seize the ensuing donut, shift it onto the donut-izing grid, and deform it that rather more consequently. The precise placement of 3D shapes onto the extra intense grids moreover adjustments which parts of their shapes are manipulated.