58 thoughts on “Naya’s Quest”
  1. Very nice little game! Also love the sound and music. Completed both normal and new game+, would love to see all those ending cutscene levels 🙂

    also found a couple of bugs:
    – die on first level after final save, choose “retry from savepoint”, this happens (softlock) https://puu.sh/4vbwJ.png
    – (spoiler alert?) this level is the only level in new game+ with cross-scanner, not with spinner https://puu.sh/4vbXH.png https://puu.sh/4vbYz.png

  2. IT’S HERE!

    I kind of really, really love this. It took me a long while to figure out what I was doing exactly (all the way in the last world, with the FEZ spin and the level where the X button “fixes” the perspective and stops you from moving is where I finally got it. I’m really dumb.) The way the game played with my perception was insanely well done. I love FEZ for a million reasons, and these are obviously two very different games, but in respect only to the use of perspective, Naya’s Quest does sooo much more!

    And then, when I thought the game couldn’t get any better, that last world happened and then I lost it! So much fun! So clever! So challenging! Ahhh! So good!

    The theme of the game is also really great. I love the idea of finding the edge of the world and how that could mean finding the edge of video games, of design or maybe even the edge of the ways we can perceive the world!

    This is what people should be playing instead of GTA. You’re a brilliant man, Terry!

  3. Really enjoyed this game. I have to admit that the final world did spark my brain off in curious directions and I’ll have to let it cool down before attempting a New Game though. The aesthetic really helps to sell the notion of perspective while also providing a great, lonely and melancholic atmosphere.

  4. Beautiful!

    The ending struck me as a metaphor for the game’s own creation, or game design in general. You can’t explore all of a possibility space – as close as you may feel to the end, there’s always another fascinating way to expand the scope. It looks like you (and I may be reading into this a little too specifically) spent some time looking at all the different ways you could take Isothingy, and came to the realization that you could work on it forever. So you made the game about that. I might be trivializing a bit, but it’s my first impression.

    Also makes me wonder if this is what happened to Selma’s Story… lost wandering through design space, closer and closer to the edge.

  5. Wow. That was powerful. Simple and yet so captivating.

    Stephen basically summed up my thoughts on the ending. To me, it was a metaphor for feature creep, and how the edge, the ending, can constantly be travelling, going farther beyond your original ideas, and ending the game after several places it could have ended – the last outside segment, for example, how Naya comments that there’s still more – just speaks to me. Seriously well done, so glad this finally got made, it was always interesting to look at in screenshots, and I’m so glad it’s finally released.

  6. Brilliant mechanics and really fun puzzles to back them up.
    @atomizer the level with the cross-scanner in New Game is the spinner level in the regular game.

  7. I really like this, great atmosphere. I find it hard to figure out how the scanner works, I find myself falling to my death too much.

  8. I find the scanner fairly misleading. It confuses me. Cool game though, although I still don’t know how to get that cube in the blue world…

  9. Pretty nice short game.
    1 minor bug. On the level with the height loadout except in game plus runthrough, the end of the level triggered for me before I reached the end square, due to the rotation I think aligning my character with the exit gate.

    Overall though, really liked the first runthrough. Second runthrough was a bit easy with the spinner (and with the knowledge from the first) but I suppose if you wanted to show off the level design, that’s a good way to do it.

    So brilliant game, and victory laps aren’t a bad thing.

  10. Whoa. This is not at all what I imagined from the screenshots. Mind-bending.

    I really like it. It’s the sort of puzzle game that makes you feel like either a genius or an imbecile.

  11. The diagonal movement level was a bit on the too difficult side though. Even with the projection on the bottom of the screen, it requires a bit too much guesswork to get through.

  12. What I AM disappointed/confused about is your ambition to make it more than a puzzler.

    In all my favorite games, the game play mechanics IS the story. Eg. Karoshi. Absolutely loved that the “story” was how difficult it was to kill yourself. And adding a super peppy/happy song to commit multiple over-work related suicides to? Sheer genius. 🙂 🙂

    In Dont Look Back, there were 2 stories – the
    difficulty of dealing with permanent loss and being willing to do anything to get someone back brilliantly integrated with a geek legend. Also just a suggestion that you literally should not look back but keep moving forward. 🙂

    Here, unfortunately somehow finding the edge and isometric perspective didn’t gel together like those 2 games. I didn’t “feel” the story with the gameplay mechanics. 🙂

  13. This is one of the best games I’ve played this year. I loved the story, especially the ending; it seemed very much a metaphor for the process of learning and of searching for greater understanding, in which the answers you discover only raise more questions. I also thought this theme was reflected nicely in the game’s overarching concept of visualizing a seemingly inconceivable higher-dimensional whole from glimpses of it from lower dimensions. A wonderful game of the type the world needs more of.

  14. Love Dave B’s comments and everyone else who “gets” the story but I guess knowing from the very start (and that was a very long time ago :p) that this game was going to play with isometric perspectives didn’t allow me to feel the story. 🙂 It did have me puzzled at how things worked, scared at will I be able to finish etc though.

  15. Well, I’ve tried it out for a bit (got to the second indoor area) and it’s very strongly reminding me of the somewhat obscure NES title Solstice (and to a lesser extent, its SNES sequel Equinox,) where the 3/4 isometric view could screw you over if you weren’t careful in those games as well. Were either of these an inspiration for this?

  16. I didn’t know brain-hurt could be so much fun.

    Not too enthused about the lives system though. It’s more an annoyance than anything else.

    But overall, thanks for making an incredible game!

  17. Hi Terry:

    I’m enjoing the game a lot, but I have only a complain. I would like that Naya would climb steps and stairs automatically.

    That’s all, that’s the only thing that need to be a perfect little jewel, in my opinion.

  18. This is a fantastic game and you’re a great guy all around for not only creating it but making it free.

    For all these superstar indie guys we hear about all the time nowadays, it’s people like you who truly deserve a medal. For making the games no one else is making, for making them good, beyond good, and for not being in it just for the money and/or attention.

    So thank you very much, Terry, and please keep up the good work. Rest assured that your work is very much appreciated.

  19. Woah. This really is the whole package: an accomplishment from a technical perspective just as much as it is an accomplishment in game design! Funny story:

    (rot13’d for spoilers)
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    Naq zl jvfu jnf tenagrq nf fbba nf v svavfurq gur tnzr 😀

    Congratulations again on finishing this project! This is like increpare-level mindbending

  20. ah, maybe a bug, probably intentional, but i started a new game plus, quit early on, came back today and realised i could continue the new game plus from the final section even though i hadn’t reached it yet. I did like it this way though!

  21. I think New Game Plus might have just been a way to showcase the most complicated effect to code (Spinner). I’m guessing the tiles were all vector shapes so it would rotate nicely, which is why there was “interference” in the hand-drawn areas. 🙂

    At the end cutscene in Plus, you can use the spinner to rotate all the areas Naya teleports through, as long as they don’t have “interference”. This makes me think that they were playable puzzle levels which needed even more special coding to be realized, and maybe that cutscene was just a way to showcase unfinished work? I’m going to have to sleep on this story, because I think it’s reaching meta-levels of depth.

  22. Damn, that was one mind-blowing experience. I especially like the final world where you inserted a new thing in every level. Really good game.

  23. Thanks Terry for filling the Phil-Fish-sized hole in my heart. You managed to exceed my high expectations with nayas. I especialy loved playing new game plus and seeing how the levels “realy” looked like.

    One thing confused me. A friend of mine played the game and got stuck on a level I didn’t know. Are the levels in the last world chosen randomly? Is this maybe what you see in the end-cutscene, the levels you didn’t get in that playthrough?

  24. atomizer: Your second “bug” is not a bug. That is the level which on the first play through you used spin – so the game makes you use scanner to avoid having a repeat level. The text though should say scanner…

  25. Nice.

    Also, is it just me, or is New Game Plus easier than the initial playthrough (or is that just because I’ve subconsciously memorized most of the game’s layouts?)?

  26. That ending kind of frustrated me… it feels like a cop-out, honestly. But the game itself was sweet. Thanks for making it!

  27. Great game!! Takes 3D puzzle gaming to a Whole new level, and truly makes you realize that nothing is as it seems in our modern 3 dimensional world.

  28. The best puzzle game I ever played. I loved this so much, that I brought superhexagon too. Not that I wanted to play it, it just seemed “unfair” not to buy anything after you created this. It was meant as “thank you” buy.

    Turned out, that superhexagon is the best abstract action game I ever played. I already spend way too much playing it.

    When is your next Android game coming out? 🙂

  29. Very great post. I simply stumbled upon your weblog and wished to
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  30. Ach! I really wanted to play this game, i already spent an inordinate amount of time playing Maverick Bird, but it seems your servers for your games are down or something. Sadness 🙁

  31. Kind of reminds me of Q-Bert. Yes, I’m THAT old! I played that one eons ago at various arcades in Northern VA, US of A. 😉

  32. I am really fond of this one, like many others.

    Sincerely, Terry, I stopped enjoying your works once you decided to go mainstream. Of course I understand there are reason to do that, but…

    I still hope to see something slow-paced, thoughtful, peculiar, like your early games, but important in dimension. Something you’ll do not for a profit, if you can and when you can.

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