Reader notice: This article was originally published on my old website and under my previous branding, Wild Goat Games, around the time of Tessell8’s launch. I’m republishing it here for anyone that’s interested in learning about the inspiration behind Tessell8. Enjoy!
Join us as we take a trip down memory lane, to the popular 90s handheld electronic game ‘Lights Out‘ and its clever puzzle mechanic that inspired the gameplay in Tessell8, a new mobile puzzle game from Wild Goat Games.
What is Lights Out?
If you were a child in the mid-to-late 90s you might have come across Lights Out, a handheld puzzle game from Tiger Electronics that filled many a Christmas stocking during its peak.
The game’s premise was straight-forward enough, players were met with a 5×5 grid of lit-up physical buttons and their challenge was simply to turn them all out. Hitting a button would toggle its light on and off, which alone doesn’t sound like much of a challenge. But the real twist was that hitting a button would also toggle the on/off status of the adjacent lights either side of it.
I was one of the aforementioned 90s children that received a copy of the Lights Out game in their stocking one year. While it didn’t dominate my attention beyond a few weeks, its concept somehow always stuck with me. To say it was harder than it looks was an understatement and, for some reason, over 20 years later I decided it would be a good idea to replicate this mechanic but make it somehow even harder.
Enter Tessell8, my modern re-imagining of Tiger Electronics’ classic 90s handheld puzzle game: Lights Out.
Introducing Tessell8: Lights Out re-imagined
Much like Lights Out, the objective of Tessell8 is to match all shapes to the target colour. Tapping a shape will toggle its colour (the equivalent of the lights’ on/off status in Lights Out) and the colour of any shapes adjacent to its sides.
Where Tessell8 takes on a life of its own however, is in the shapes that are used and the scale, complexity, and variety of the levels. In creating Lights Out, Tiger Electronics were limited by the form of their game. By having a physical handheld unit, they were forced to pick a single tessellating shape and a size of playable area that would be simple enough for beginners, but able to present a challenged to more capable players too.
The limitless possibility of mobile game development, on the other hand, enabled me to expand the the mechanics: shifting from a single 5×5 grid, to puzzles made-up of any tessellating set of shapes with the capability for generating levels of much greater size.
Beyond this, Tessell8 promises some fantastic features that build on Lights Out. To name a few:
- Over 60 challenging levels to unlock and master.
- 11 unique tessellations, including both regular and semi-regular tessellation of a variety of polygonal shapes.
- A custom game mode in which you set the pattern, colour, size and difficulty; and Tessell8 will generate a brand new and entirely random puzzle for you to complete.
Sounds interesting? Check it out for yourself in the trailer below!
How to play Lights Out free with Tessell8
Simply put, if you’re reading this because you were looking for a way to play Lights Out free online, look no further than Tessell8. It’s free, contains no ads, and was made with love and a passion to bring this awesome mechanic to the mobile gaming era.
View and download Tessell8 for Android and iOS here.
Still just wish you could play Lights Out? Well, luckily for you, you can replicate it in Tessell8’s custom game mode.
If you do get a chance to play it, let me know how it compares to the original in the comments below. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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