Lowercase-loving puzzle game .Projekt is unusually difficult to write about for a number of reasons. The most obvious issue here is that its stylized title makes it impossible to start sentences with its name, though there’s also the fact that, like many other puzzle games, its gameplay is explained easily enough to defy a longer writeup. At its core, this is a game where you’re given a 5x5x5 space and tasked with stacking blocks in order to cast specific shadows at two walls, and while later gameplay additions add a considerable amount of difficulty that makes accomplishing this much less simple than it might sound at first, the goal itself never becomes particularly difficult to grasp.

Stacking without gravity, tapping without depth

There are no physics that have to be accounted for in .projekt, so it’s entirely viable to build up a stack of several blocks and then erase the bottom ones in order to leave a single block floating merrily in the air without anything supporting it. Structures often lean haphazardly, and creating blocks for the singular purpose of creating other blocks off of them is a common occurrence. Basically, blocks can only be placed on the ground or on the face of another block, so placing something that dangles three spaces up sometimes requires building up a stack of blocks in the “wrong” place so that you can build off of it. There’s no penalty for doing so, as you can create and destroy blocks freely, and this makes .projekt a very relaxing kind of puzzle game. Levels only count as finished once you’ve figured out a way of casting the correct shadows, though.

There are two gameplay additions that complicate matters ever so slightly. The first is a min/max number of blocks you can use, and this is essentially an optional challenge to complete levels as efficiently or inefficiently as possible. The second addition is picross, which means each column and row can only have a specific number of blocks used in it, forcing you to destroy them and slowly piece together a configuration that uses the correct number of blocks in every direction. Where the min/max levels merely offer an optional challenge, the picross levels radically change the way you approach the game, and it felt like the mix between picross and non-picross levels was about 50/50. Then again, they ended up taking me much longer than the earlier levels, so it’s hard to say.

I played the Android version of .projekt, and this version comes with some pretty significant pros and cons. Where I imagine the PC version has you clicking to place blocks (that’s an assumption; I haven’t tried it), you have to rely on taps in the mobile versions. These taps are wildly inaccurate and may or may not actually place the blocks where you intend them to go, and destroying blocks is accomplished with long presses that suffer from the same problem. The controls work well enough early on, but things get a bit more dicey toward the end of the game when the structures become more vertical and large numbers of blocks are obscured because of the camera’s angle. Adjusting at this point can be a maddening process full of accidental taps and long presses that leave you hunting down rogue blocks and replacing any wrongly destroyed in the process. That brings me to the first advantage of the mobile version, and that’s how the phone’s accelerometer is used to slightly tilt the camera. Admittedly, this isn’t enough to fix the issues with the camera (in part because the visuals don’t lend themselves well to conveying depth, meaning a higher stack of blocks tends to look identical to a stack underneath it), but it’s one of those small touches that add a lot. The other, arguably bigger advantage the mobile version has is that it’s three dollars cheaper than the PC version. That might not seem like a big deal, but they’re presumably identical products and there’s no reason to pay more than you have to. Especially when it comes to shorter games like this that don’t include a story to get attached to.

Synthy, forgettable pads and monochrome

First off, I legitimately can’t tell if this game has more than one music track. If it does, then it’s safe to say that they’re not especially memorable. It’s also possible that there’s just the one track. Either way, the music strikes me as a bit of a missed opportunity given how much a varied soundtrack can add in terms of differentiating different sections and making them memorable. It’s serviceable background music, of course, but serviceable is a strange thing to aim for given how stylistic .projekt is in other areas; all of its text is lowercase and preceded by random punctuation, and the visuals are an incredibly striking monochrome with a film grain effect on top that adds some welcome visual flair. Even better, there are two color modes: the default white background and dark cubes, and a “night mode” that turns the background black and the cubes lighter.

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