Blackbox
Believe it or not, I was also a child once
And I very much ❤️ed puzzles! So much so, that actually the only toys I had as a child were a box full of puzzles.
My addiction started off with simple jigsaw puzzles
But as a grew so did my interest. When I was in primary school my interest started shifting more towards wooden puzzles
And later on towards some metallic ones
When I got to high school, I had discovered the 秘密箱 (a.k.a. Himitsu-Bako) which are these amazing hand-made Japanese puzzle boxes that require you to take somewhere between 3 to100 steps to open
When I got to University, I had decided to study Computer Science which, in turn, totally changed the way I look at puzzles. I started discovering things like the Advent of Code by Eric Wastl and fell once more in ❤️ with puzzles
After I graduated, I didn’t have any more time to spend on puzzles. It was time to start earning some 💵
So I joined two friends of mine: Bastiaan Terhorst and Casper Schipper who had founded an amazing design studio called Perceptor
At Perceptor, we often dared to get our hands dirty. We built visualisations, exhibition guides, games, websites, interactive installations. We have collaborated with amazing artists such as Navid Nuur and Lauren McCarthy.
In 2012 we heard about the fact that the stimuleringsfonds was putting aside a subsidy for the making of games. We all loved games, design and science so we made a rough plan to create a game that brings all three together. Our proposal got accepted and we started sketching many ideas
After a lot of hard work, Perloo was born
Perloo is a ludic experiment, perhaps even a philosophical proposition. But most of all, Perloo is an excruciatingly hard puzzle game. You might cry.
In 2014, I unfortunately had to leave Perceptor. After all those amazing years I was feeling a little lost, I didn’t quite have a feeling of direction in me. So I decided to take a more safe but less exciting path. I started steering towards the enterprise life and ended up working for ABN AMRO
Years have passed and my love for puzzles had slowly started fading away. Until one day a colleague came up to me and told me that he had found a new puzzle game. He needed me to install it as well since there was a chapter which required QR codes generated by multiple players.
For the sake of helping him, I downloaded and installed the game. I was amazed to see what what Ryan McLeod had created. I played it for hours and hours. Feeling like a child again. It as as if my whole life was kind of a buildup towards this moment. And Blackbox was the drop.
So go ahead, give it a try and please give the man a 🌮 if you enjoy what you see!
