A puzzle game where you need to touch blocks in the correct order: Violarium by EasyYogi.
Hi! I'm Bart Bonte, a Belgian independent game designer and this is where I blog about interesting new browser and mobile games.
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34 comments:
Nice one, not too hard. Just have to learn when & where to turn around.
If only there were an instruction manual, especially given how even pressing a key once at normal speed sometimes leads to moving two spaces, unless the key is pressed for less time than normal. Also, for some puzzles, activating some numbers by touching them is impossible without touching another previously activated number, causing the puzzle to reset. If anything, the designer only created Catch-22s. If you're even aware of that idiom and that book.
The magical space music and soft sound effects are so delicious. 🍽️ Even with just pixels, the music and colors transported me to walking on the tree for blue butterflies in Macalania Woods (FFX) at night. Bookmarking this
The music and color palette, especially the blue water lines, also transported me to the Game Grid in the film, Tron (1982). 🍽️
I liked this one a lot.
This was a good one. You have to figure out the rules as you go along, and as you do puzzles that seemed impossible before become trivial. I'd love to see this expanded to a larger game if the creator is inclined to do so.
There's specific rules you have to figure out, it's not as impossible as it might look even when touching two numbers.
Hmm. This game's description states "No AI or other automated tools were used in the puzzle design." but if you expand the More Information section, there are two tags next to AI Disclosure: AI Assisted (https://itch.io/games/ai-assisted) and Code (https://itch.io/games/ai-code). Nooooooo
Really? Dang, that sucks, I liked this game
Thank you so much for the kind words! It makes me so happy that people enjoyed the music on top of the puzzles :) The pixel art by the way was not of my creation. It was made by Algernon3000.
Yogev
Indeed I used AI to implement the mechanics of the puzzles into code. Sorry if this disappoints you too much :( But I promise that the creative aspects of the game were 100% made by human intelligence.
Yogev
Who cares if he used AI? It wouldn't be any different than hiring a personal assistant to help him.
https://theharvardpoliticalreview.com/ai-water-consumption/
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/04/why-are-communities-pushing-back-against-data-centers/
hmmm Human input is still more valuable. I enjoyed the game, but if I found out it was AI-coded right away I probably would have avoided it. At least the art and visuals aren't AI so there's that. I'm just worried about the future of game development where AI could potentially dilute the essence of human effort and creativity. We really need to be careful with how much we rely on AI because if it takes over game development and other divisions of the tech industry, our world will likely become devoid of personality and well, humanness? Between someone who created something on their own a 100% and someone who relied on AI regardless of how much, the former definitely deserves more praise. Okay, maybe A LITTLE AI assistance wouldn't hurt, but letting AI assist "a little" might tempt you to rely on it even more and you might say "okay just a little more AI" until you do not realize how overdependent you are on it already.
AI Data Centers are creating 'heat islands' and warming the land around them and contributing to hotter weather.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/30/climate/data-centers-are-having-an-underrported
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2026/05/19/new-evidence-data-centers-cause-hotter-weather/
Data centers are so hot their ‘heat island’ effect is raising temperatures up to 6 miles away and impacting 343 million people worldwide, study finds
https://fortune.com/2026/04/01/ai-data-centers-heat-island-hyperscalers/
AI data centers’ “infrasound” pollution linked to nausea, from migraines to vomiting, and insomnia in nearby residents.
https://epawatch.org/2026-05-29-data-centers-infrasound-pollution-linked-to-nausea-insomnia.html
Noise emitted by data centers can be heard and felt hundreds of feet away. According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI), noise levels can reach 96 decibels for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Sound exceeding 85 decibels is considered dangerous to human hearing.
Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
Data centers emit harmful pullutants, risking asthma, heart attacks, and cognitive decline.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/data-centers-pollution
Because AI data centers are built in low-income areas, stealing and polluting drinkable water used to cool data centers, spiking utility bills, causing hotter weather, emitting constant noise at frequencies that harm all flora and fauna in their vicinities, literally stealing and killing centuries of the arts with ai slop, and promoting anti-intellectualism with the promise of "helping students."
"In the United States alone, the demand for AI is projected to push data-center electricity consumption to 6.7 to 12.0 percent of the nation’s total by 2028. By that same date, water consumption for cooling these data-center facilities is predicted to double, or even quadruple, compared to the 2023 level."
AI also increases worker exploitation and wealth inequality, vastly enhances surveillance capabilities, and allows misinformation and propaganda to be manufactured and disseminated at an industrial scale. All of these things directly materially aid the emerging technofascist state. There's a reason that data centers are built discretely and speedily out of public eye by technofascists.
AI is the embodiment of unregulated capitalism. It's an exploitative technology built on an unsustainable investment bubble, environmental classicism, racism, economic disparity, and educational devastation against the empty promise of delivering a utopian future which wouldn't even benefit anyone but the wealthiest corporations, billionaires and trillionaires, and ultimately, militaries. Do not use AI and do not support others that use it. Period.
There are absolutely legitimate concerns about data centers, especially when it comes to electricity use, water consumption, noise, pollution, and where they are being built. I don’t think anyone should just dismiss those concerns. But some of what is being said here goes well beyond what the evidence actually shows.
One thing that immediately stands out is the sources being cited. The Harvard Political Review, Harvard Gazette, CNN, Forbes, Fortune, EPAWatch, YouTube, and IEEE Spectrum are not peer-reviewed scientific journals. Some of those outlets may report on legitimate research, and some may link to actual studies, but the articles themselves have not gone through scientific peer review. That distinction matters when very strong health or environmental claims are being made.
Having “Harvard” in the name also does not automatically make something a Harvard scientific study. The Harvard Political Review is a student publication, and the Harvard Gazette is a university news publication. Neither is the same thing as publishing research in a peer-reviewed journal.
True, thank you for explaining the distinction for laypersons. I actually do publish in peer-reviewed, scopus indexed science journals with a substantial h-index. I admit I fell into the trap of implicit bias just now and assumed that someone who simply compared the use of ai to a human assistant likely favored and used ai frequently themselves and might consequently struggle with reading comprehension of data in a peer-reviewed scientific journal publication and so, opted to very quickly provide easy-to-digest articles based on legitimate research (except for YouTube...that was for the reading-averse...who need ai to summarize an article for them).
I'm glad this automatically saves progress, I bailed out a few times and was glad to come back where I left off. Managed to finish it. A key to the mechanic is that you can solve the tricky ones incrementally, you get infinite retries, so that's nice.
I'm still stuck on this puzzle:
4_1
2_3
I hope some people know where I'm coming from with my Catch-22. And I, diagnosed with autism and ADHD(just so you know me as a person irl), am pretty sure I tried EVERYTHING!
I spent a long time on that one, and I think it's where the rules actually kind of crystallized for me.
My solution (rot13): Qb gur svefg oybpx. Gura tb hc gb gur gbc bs gur "pbyhza", naq tb vagb gur abgpu nobir vg (v.r. sebz gur svefg oybpx, tb hc rvtug gvzrf, yrsg bapr, naq hc ntnva) naq snpr gb gur evtug, naq gura tb fgenvtug qbja hagvy lbh ner yriry jvgu gur frpbaq oybpx. Orpnhfr lbh ner snpvat gb gur evtug, lbh pna cnff gur sbhegu oybpx jvgubhg gevttrevat vg. Bapr lbh ner va sebag bs gur frpbaq oybpx, tb yrsg gb gevttre vg. Gura tb qbja, naq gevttre gur guveq oybpx sebz orybj vg. Gura tb yrsg bapr, naq tb hc gb or yriry jvgu gur sbhegu oybpx -- lbh ner abj snpvat yrsg, fb gur bar naq guerr oybpxf qb abg gevttre. Uvg gur sbhegu oybpx, naq lbh'er qbar.
Thanks to a ROT13 message, I made it to this:
___3_
_4__5
1__2_
Hard to describe, so I made a video of this one.
https://streamable.com/p22jrp
Now on this:
___2_4
1_____
_____5
____3_
ROT 13:
Tb qbja naq gbhpu 1
Tb nyy gur jnl hc, gura gb gur evtug naq gbhpu gur fjvgpu
Tb qbja bar, ghea gb gur yrsg
Tb qbja gb gbhpu 2 naq 3
Tb hc 1, ghea evtug
Tb hc gb gbhpu 4
Tb nyy gur jnl hc naq gbhpu gur fjvgpu
Tb nyy gur jnl gb gur yrsg
Tb qbja bar, ghea evtug
Tb nyy gur jnl gb gur obggbz hagvy lbh ner ybbxvat ng 5
Gbhpu 5
An update on my progress. Without needing hints and figuring it out myself, without hacking- since I don't even know how to do that- I made it to the teleportation pads. I unlocked 1/2 of the four goblets, but am stuck on two.
One of them:
__1_4__
__3_6__
5_____2
The other:
___1_
_2___
6____
____5
_3_4_
I think I got a hold of the mechanics, especially the teleporters. And I hope to propagate the order, especially the directions.
New update. Finally solved the first one. The other is trickier, since I have the idea for the order. I'll encrypt with ROT-13.
Tb haqre BAR, gura evtug, gura gjb sbejneq(erfrggvat gur guvat), gura bar evtug(gheavat BAR ba), gura tb qbja(yrnqvat gb GJB orvat ba), gura tb bar qbja(npgvingvat GUERR), gura bar hc, gura bar qbja(npgvingvat SBHE naq SVIR cebcreyl).
That's as far as I can go. Whatever other move I can do always resets everything, with SIX never being activated. I need to figure out what I'm missing.
So the questions here motivated me to finally learn how to record and edit videos from my screen, to make a walkthrough. I hope it's reasonably clear, there are a couple of edits, and some of the solutions go pretty quickly in retrospect, you have to pay attention to subtleties, but I'm reasonably happy with it.
Spoiler alert, ofc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiUHCLrXVnc
Thank you so much for doing this! Thanks to this video I realized that I've made a few mistakes in the puzzle design. I will fix it in the follow up game, if it ever happens.
Yogev
Nice game, beautiful music, thank you.
A nice one, I loved it !
Incredible game. Loved the slight difficulty ramp.
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