#adam atomic

Dino Sort (Adam Atomic, 2025)

I wrote about getting into PICO-8 games recently by way of Adam Atomic’s Prince of Prussia and owning a Chinese emulation handheld (a subscriber exclusive) and Adam recently dropped Dino Sort which I don’t think I can justify an entire post on expzine.com for, so isn’t it brilliant I have a newsletter now?

Anyway, Dino Sort is a brilliant wee game where you shuffle around dinosaurs to get them into the right positions based on their personal requirements (e.g. “don’t put me next to a predator”) very much in the style of Rush Hour. There are 26 designed puzzles which will probably take you, I don’t know, forty-five minutes to polish off or something, and though it will require some logic and lateral thinking, it’s good because at least I never ended up in one of those situations where untangling all my dinosaurs was going to be annoying or impossible the way it would be in a Sokoban game or something (god I hate Sokoban.)

Also as someone who actually hates when a puzzle game has a billion puzzles–the “infinite pizza” problem, you eventually get sick of even pizza–I loved that this was something I could pick up, play and put down, but if you really wanted to keep playing this, you can because it generates a daily puzzle every day. They’re of varying quality, but just think, you could play it every day instead of doing a Wordle, because The New York Times can fuck off.

“Canabalt is a one-button endless runner in which a well-dressed person attempts to outrun the destruction of their city via a series of carefully timed jumps.”

It was created in 2009 by Adam Saltsman and Danny Baranowsky as a Flash game as part of the Experimental Gameplay Project under the theme “Bare Minimum”

And another title by Adam Atomic, FATHOM is a platformer, to the likeness of Cave Story, where the player guides an unnamed protagonist, that largely resembles a robot, through a facility. Capable of shooting the gun that it carries and jumping, it soon faces opposition to its advancement.

This is not a spoiler, but remember: if ou ever feel lost in the game, follow the general direction your "friends" are going into. Yes you will make friends in the game, and they're adorable.

After the jump is my own interpretation of the ending, which is bound to make people feel weird and confused. Yes it contains spoilers, that's why it has a "read more" break. (I miss having a spoiler tag)

Navigate a minefield using your trusty (or sometimes not-so-trusty) gravity hook, which lets you "grab" onto a distant object (which so happens to be an explosive) to ascend into the skies. Or, at least, to what you hope is an upper part of whatever structure you are currently located at. That is Gravity Hook.