The Adventures of Stick Figure Joe Demo

Half-Life 2 was one of the first mainstream games to really make the physics engine part of the gameplay. Maybe Valve exaggerated a little bit with the seesaw puzzles, but the spark was bright enough to inspire other developers to do the same. Hence, we now have plenty of video games that take advantage of realistic physics in order to challenge the players in a variety of ways.

The Adventures of Stick Figure Joe is a casual puzzle game very similar to Crayon Physics, except that it features a more humane character. His name is Joe, and he is a badly sketched stick figure with a simple purpose: reach the end of each stage. Thus, your job is to get him there, using nothing but lines and boxes to do so, which can be drawn with a pencil.

It must be mentioned that the game is more of a tech demo at the moment, so it doesn’t feature all the components the full version might contain. The gameplay is decent at best, because there are many glitches and annoyances that make it difficult to have fun with the game. However, there’s certainly potential in the concept, at least if everything is sorted out until the final version is released.

There are a handful of objects at your disposal when it comes to solving the levels, such as straight lines, boxes and boulders. However, each one of these must be drawn according to the instructions, which kind of hurts the whole “sandbox” atmosphere. As an example, boxes have to be drawn from either the bottom left or bottom right corner, otherwise nothing is created.

Another issue is the fact that there’s no way to delete or erase objects once you place them in the level. The only option seems to be a complete level restart, which is mighty annoying when you have to re-draw multiple objects. Granted, the few stages that are available right now are not very long or too difficult, but things might change if more content is added.

The Adventures of Stick Figure Joe is not quite there yet, but it has some strong building blocks to work with. As long as the bugs are fixed and some vital components are added, this could certainly turn into something quite popular.