Format: PC
Developer: Event Cascades
www.cascadeup.com/chessmine

Monochrome, blocky, and fairly brief, Chessmine was ushered into the world without a breathless sales pitch, accompanied instead by a lofty dismissal from its own creator. “I personally do not care for Chessmine,” writes the enigmatic Event Cascade, presumably decked out in a velvet smoking jacket and sprawled, sockless, across the length of a chaise longue, “but some people seem to like it.” Don’t be fooled, though. Few internet beachcombers are liable to come across such a shapely piece of underselling without wanting to take a closer look.

You’d better make that a much closer look. Despite initial impressions, Chessmine doesn’t simulate chess so much as improvise on its general theme. It’s a playful parasite lodged deep inside the ancient game, feeding off its rules as it pleases.

The result manages to be both familiar and strange. The chequered board is still an abstract battlefield, but you’re no longer trying to win the war. Instead, like a pixelated Solid Snake, yours is a mission of infiltration as you sneak between famous landmarks, running a deadly one-hit gauntlet of rook, pawn and bishop in order to grab each level’s key and take it to the exit. At first, it feels musty and a little reverent, as if you’re merely tiptoeing around a museum exhibit. But although the aim of the game has changed, it’s still a matter of life and death, and moving within the traditional attack radius of a piece will soon see you killed.

Invention starts to become apparent as Chessmine settles into its own groove. Shields and bombs come into play and things get progressively trickier, adding to your tactical options, even if they spoil some of the game’s conceptual purity. But Chessmine is otherwise built with the lightest of touches. As a puzzle game, it’s smart and nimble, its blocky black and white visuals calling to mind a dozen early PC sims and creating a strong sense of nostalgic inconsequence. As a creative twist on chess itself, it’s the latest in a surprisingly venerable tradition of playful tinkerings, with curiosities such as three-player layouts and cylindrical boards reaching back a few centuries.

What’s really interesting, however, is the way in which Chessmine’s blending of pre-existing elements suggests that rules and playing pieces created and refined for one game can make an interesting and unexpected basis for another. Game design is, by nature, light-fingered and iterative, building on the back of past experiments: a health system from one title, targeting from another. Chessmine simply takes it a little further, with a more open-minded, shameless kind of theft, in which mechanics are slotted together in gleaming chunks, as if the developer himself is assembling the pieces of a puzzle.

Mash-ups have long been a part of music, so perhaps it was inevitable that, starting in the garage-coding scene, they’d have an equally creative impact in game design. And, while it’s likely that teams of highly motivated lawyers will descend to bust up the fun when it gets too close to big IP, if today Chessmine is only really good for a single lunch break’s worth of entertainment, maybe tomorrow will bring that Head Over Heels MMO you’ve always wanted, or the strange delights of a Robotron text adventure. Anything’s possible – even if Event Cascades doesn’t care for it.