HarmonyBot 6000 is a narrative-driven puzzle game. In the game, you play as HB6K, a social-emotional support module on the computer of the spaceship Transcendent. Gameplay revolves around visual-novel-style interactions with the crew, and puzzle play inspired by the Flow Free game series, which popularized numberlink puzzles. HB6K exists in order to solve these numberlink puzzles, in order to help this kind of outer-space family unit find their way through their various challenges, as a cohesive group.
Something that I found so interesting imagining these sort of deconstructed and subverted number-link puzzles is, here’s this person, here’s where they want to go, here’s this goal, or this need, or this want, and then you’re looking at, okay, you know, how do all of these people, how do they all get that thing? How do each of them find their way towards that thing that is important to them without getting into each other’s way, without it being this zero-sum game?
The Transcendent’s crew is like a kind of family, and I’m using them to lightly explore themes of enmeshment. Enmeshment is a situation where instead of each person in a group being a whole and complete individual unto themselves, there’s this codependency. Each person gets to really focus on a certain role, and that role is reinforced by the rest of the group. There are parts of themselves that they are no longer able to access so well, and those parts get projected onto other people in the group. And often people taking on a role like that see that role as the fullness of who they are. They don’t necessarily realize that they’re inhabiting a much smaller piece of themselves. In the best possible world, I see number-link puzzles as these beautiful representations of a group of people who are supporting each other and enabling each other to each go after the thing that they care about the most, their deepest values, their deepest instincts, their deepest selves, and really fully express that. And they find a way to do it together. But the dark side of that is this enmeshment and this situation in which all of these people are fitting together into a cohesive whole because each of them is only allowed to be a small part of themselves in order to fit that larger group.
In the context of numberlink puzzles, I think that there’s some really interesting possibilities around HB6K gathering the data to create their simulation so that they can solve the puzzle. The ideal numberlink puzzle is a board in which the things that are being represented there is truly each of those persons’ deepest wants, their deepest needs, the thing that makes them whole.
So, if you imagine a full, complete person who is whole and has good boundaries, one way that you can look at this is a person who is:
- having a good working relationship with their mind and their thoughts,
- having a good working relationship with their emotions, and
- having a good working relationship with their body.
Mind, emotions, and body come together and you get this overlap in the middle of feeling complete within yourself, and even in times of hardship, having that deep self-connection to draw on. So, in the crew of the transcendent, because it’s an enmeshed system, people don’t have that kind of wholeness as individuals. Instead, these roles are split up among the people in the group.
The Captain, Professor Alwin Auric , is symbolized by the color yellow and is connected with this idea of mind and ego. He has a very strong sense of personality, he has a very strong sense of who he is and what this entire crew should be doing. He’s the captain, he is a scientist and a diplomat, and he is the one that everybody looks to to determine what is good and valuable and what is not. And he loves that role. He is sort of an absent-minded professor type, but he sees himself as very much a space hero. He wants to explore, he wants to find the clever paths towards a better world. And he thinks that the way to do that is through science and the type of thinking that he is so good at. The professor is excited about force of will and beautiful ideals that are almost just separated and divorced from reality. So the professor loves numberlink puzzles. He’s the one who most wants to see a beautiful, classic, standard solution to a numberlink puzzle that fills all of the squares and connects all of the dots. Captain Auric is also the one who’s most able to teach how to solve numberlink puzzles within the story of the game. An interesting strategy for solving very large numberlink puzzles involves drawing lines on the board that don’t connect to any dots at all. And that feels like something that really fits with Professor Auric’s character. I could see him teaching this to HarmonyBot and saying, “Hey, you’re thinking too much about the people involved in this situation. Maybe approach this puzzle a little bit more abstractly—take this to an even more theoretical level.”
The First Officer, Rudi Saint-Britto , is the second member of the crew. She is symbolized by the color red, and she’s connected with the idea of the body. She is a person who gets things done. So she’s a great counterpoint to the professor’s idealism. She’s the one who tries to bring those ideals down into reality. And so she’s a very powerful person, but at the same time, she’s the one who gets to tangle with that tension between what is theoretically imagined and what is actually possible in a real world with real world limitations. When it comes to the numberlink puzzles, First Officer Rudi introduces this challenge of resource management. The captain wants to see puzzle solutions that are beautiful, and Rudi just wants the puzzle to get solved however it can get solved. So Rudi is the one who is asking the question of, “Why are we using all these squares? Can we afford to use all these squares? Oh hey, these two points are right next to each other. Why do they have to wrap all the way around like this? Could we just connect them? If people are having to go this far and use this many squares, maybe it’s not meant to be.”
Even for somebody with the tremendous force of will, real world limitations can’t be ignored and bypassed forever. So, narratively in the story, the player is going to encounter situations where they are having to work much more closely with Rudy and be like, “okay, okay, what can we connect? What can’t we connect? How can we do this in the best way possible? Like what is essential for us to do and what can we put to the wayside?”
One of Rudy’s core powers is called Compromise, and it enables the player to take any one end point on the grid and move it one square. This can have a huge impact on what is possible. Rudy also has a skill called Salvage, which allows the player to gain some kind of resource for every square that remains empty at the resolution of a puzzle.
Professor Auric… his goals and Rudy’s goals may seem to be in conflict, but you can actually manipulate puzzles using Rudy’s skill of Compromise to make it so that you don’t use all the puzzle squares and yet you arrive at a solution that is pleasing to Auric as well. Rudy is a producer.