Mu Cartographer is an absolutely fascinating game. It’s a weird game, and I’m always down to try out something unusual or unique, and Mu Cartographer definitely ticks those boxes. As a short description, Mu Cartographer is basically an art/exploration game with strong puzzle elements. Unlike many puzzle games, which present you with a puzzle and ask you to solve it (like The Room for example), with Mu Cartographer, the game itself is the puzzle, including the game mechanics and even figuring out things like changing in-game options is something that needs to be figured out.

When you initially run the game, straight away you’re presented with a kind of control panel filled with buttons, toggles, switches, graphs and knobs; it’s as if you’ve just stepped inside a UFO and you’re sitting in the alien cockpit. And this is where the fun begins. You basically start off by just fiddling around randomly trying to figure out how any of it works, trying to get some sense, some feedback. I can’t reveal too much without spoiling the game, because the enjoyment and satisfaction from this experience occurs as you slowly master the controls. By the end, I knew exactly what every little button would do, and I was controlling this weird thing as if I were riding a bike or typing on a keyboard, pressing buttons and twiddling knobs intuitively to reach the objectives of the game, eventually completing the game entirely.

(sometimes strangely-familiar forms will emerge from the foggy peaks, valleys and blobs)

Let’s talk about atmosphere. As I was playing Mu Cartographer, I experienced the strange meditative satisfaction that one might get through assembling some Ikea furniture.. on a rainy day, with candles and ambient music droning around. The synthesized music is really well done and is a key component of the experience. It evolves as you make new discoveries, bringing emotion to the experience. As you unravel the puzzle, you are also unearthing a story presented as journal entries. Pieced together it makes an entire story and adds another layer of engagement to the experience. Finally I have to discuss the visuals: Mu Cartographer is a very beautiful visual experience, and eventually it feels like you’re sculpting, you’re involved in creating the imagery rather than simply experiencing it. You soon learn how to change the colours and other features, and often you stumble across sublime shapes and forms.

The game sells for $5 on Steam, but I got it from the Humble Store for less than half of that. It took me four hours to complete the game entirely, but it’s an immersive world that I enjoyed and I’ll definitely be returning to explore and experiment. One could actually ignore the objectives entirely and just fiddle around in it, and often that's just as fun as trying to complete goals/beat the game. Highly recommended for anyone who likes weird puzzles, or if you want a short meditative, satisfying experimental puzzle/art-creation game with an (optional) story & reading.

(this game is like the imaginative calm of watching clouds. sometimes you start to see certain recognisable forms in the noise; some are real and some are imagined. the alien controls have a customisable in-built screenshot-taker and Twitter integration so you could just ignore the goals and use the game to make and share your artistic creations)