Little Sisyphus

Pubby's climbing game: steal a pearl, collect 80 souls and escape up the mountain to Olympus, dragging the pearl behind you.

The whole game is one climb. The hero is tied to a heavy pearl by a rope, and both are physically simulated, so the pearl bounces, swings and keeps its momentum. Getting it onto each ledge is the puzzle, and falls back down are frequent. There are two modes, Casual and Frantic.

Pubby made it in about a month for the NESdev Compo 2023, writing it in NESfab, the NES programming language Pubby created. The ball physics came from earlier NESfab demos, and the rope uses position-based dynamics. The black, white and orange look follows ancient Greek pottery, partly by way of the game Apotheon. The music has no drums, because the DPCM channel is used for the underwater effect and the noise channel for sound effects.

Planned story cutscenes were dropped to fit the game on the cartridge, so the heist plot is told in a few sentences. In the compo it ranked first for overall impression and for art and style.