You think Half-Life 2 is the only game with physics puzzles? Bah. You've not tried to get an armadillo to roll into an interdimensional portal in Armadillo Run. Also, what the hell have I just written?
Frustrations
Armadillo Run is a simple little game that seems more of an educational tool than anything else. An armadillo has tucked himself into a ball and needs to get to a portal to return home. Obviously. He can't just waddle around looking for the portal himself, though. Instead, we must guide him there with the power of science.
And how do we learn science? Reading. Lots of reading.
Lots of optional reading, as it turned out, for there are plenty of tutorials in this demo for Armadillo Run - tutorials you'll probably need if you want a chance at saving this little basketball.
An example of physics in action shows us what we'll be getting up to. Different materials can have varying amounts of force applied to them such that they behave predictably and accurately in this simulation. Whether rolling down a metal slope or bouncing into a cloth buffer, you can rest assured that this armadillo will do what you think it'll do when you finally hit the 'Start' button - it's what your efforts of engineering will do that you might not be too familiar with...
Did you know that tension can pull objects towards you, or that when something breaks, a whole load of tension elsewhere can be harnessed to jump the armadillo over a gap? No? Then Armadillo Run is either going to amaze or frustrate you.
Here's the first level. You can see what the armadillo will do, you know where he needs to stop, and you've been educated a little on material physics. How shall we apply what we've learned to this puzzle?
If you answered 'bucket', you're on my wavelength.
Perhaps making a mockery of the idea of this being an educational tool, a lot of my solutions were buckets or walls of one form or another. Are they elegant solutions? Are they the most efficient? Why are you asking those questions? They get the job done, don't they?
There are only a handful of levels available in the demo, and sometimes the bucket approach didn't quite work. In this case, my bucket wasn't high enough for the armadillo to enter the portal, so I just put some metal over the cloth and made the bucket higher up. Problem solved. It broke the physics a little but worked more or less as intended.
The challenges did get harder, but though I was told of tension and whatnot, as I went on I found that I wasn't really learning anything, or at least I didn't feel like I was.
What I was doing in iterating my design was to come in under budget more than it was to be efficient. The metal worked but was too costly. Would cloth work if I hung it in the right place? Eventually, when the armadillo settled, yes it would. What did I learn?
Well, technically, I learned about hanging cloth in such a way as to create a bucket, so I learned something, clearly, but why do I feel like I didn't? Some examples of what can be done in the full game clued me in:
I may have been learning about the differences between metal and cloth, but I was understanding none of it. Tension was something to do with whether my rope snapped or drooped. Timing rods to explode after a set amount of time was a feature I never used outside of the tutorial, partly because I didn't need to, mostly because it'd require more thought than I was capable of, adding unnecessary steps to the plan: Step 1) Make bucket.
Final Word
I was done with the Armadillo Run demo after twenty minutes. It's a great many physics puzzles with all kinds of ways to solve them. Excellent. Am I interested in more? No. Not in the slightest.
This game - and it is a game - does what it does very well. Apart from teaching so that we understand it, but then for all my talk of this being an educational game, I don't think it was ever set out to be such a thing. More a puzzle game that can educate. Which it does, I suppose. I'm getting nowhere here. What am I trying to say?
Armadillo Run is an early example of a physics engine being used for playing and creating with a scientific, engineering twist. Without it and games like it, would we have the likes of Poly Bridge? Probably, yes. Physics simulations generally make for good games - entertaining, at the very least.
Is Armadillo Run entertaining? Not for me. Doesn't even look much like an armadillo.
I'm too harsh on this game. There's no need to be like this towards it. If you're interested in twenty minutes of tinkering with cloth and metal, go right ahead. Buy the whole game if you want more. There's nothing wrong with it, but it is taking up 2 megabytes of space on my hard drive just sitting here, unappealingly.
Fun Facts
Armadillos are funky little creatures, but most of them can't roll up into balls.
Armadillo Run, developed by Peter Stock, first released in 2006.
Version played: PC, 2006.