She Remembered Caterpillars

She Remembered Caterpillars is a color-matching puzzle game wrapped in an aesthetic the developers call 'fungipunk' — vivid, organic, slightly unsettling, full of writhing caterpillars and brightly colored Gammies moving through architecture that seems alive in its own right. Beneath the surface puzzle game runs a quiet narrative about a scientist's attempt to save her father, with the larger story of what cataclysm caused this world to look like this unfolding chapter by chapter.

The puzzle mechanics start simple and stack. Each Gammy has a color; each bridge accepts certain colors and rejects others. Mixing two Gammies of different colors produces a third color that can cross bridges neither original could. The 40-level campaign introduces a new mechanic or color in every act, building cleanly on the previous lessons so that the difficulty climbs without ever feeling unfair, and the late puzzles demand careful sequencing of merges and separations across multiple bridges at once.

The presentation is the other reason the game lingers. Artwork from Daniel Leander Goffin — IGF 2014 Student Showcase Award winner for Symmetrain — gives the world its strange painterly quality, and Thomas Höhl (composer for Galaxy On Fire and the Deponia trilogy) provides a haunting score that fits the slowly unfolding melancholy. Shapes and symbols accompany every color cue, so the game is fully playable for color-blind players from the start.