Turbo Pudding
It’s Saturday, so it’s time for screenshots. In Panemonium, every window in the town of Vitrea is stained glass, and someone has locked the sunrise inside ten thousand panes of night glass. You bounce the Spark off your Prism, break the panes one by one, and the town wakes up around you.
Each of the twenty levels is a picture made of glass, and most of them bring one new trick. We picked five levels and froze each one at the moment its trick goes off. That’s level 7, Up the Ropes, at the top of this post, a split second after the Spark hits the gondola.
Level 4: Hot from the Kiln
The fourth level of Lantern Lane is a glassblowers’ kiln: a dome with two chimneys and a curl of smoke, all made of glass. Right in the mouth of the kiln sit four glowing panes of ember glass.
When an ember pane breaks, it bursts and takes out every glass pane around it, corners included. If one of those neighbors is an ember too, it goes off next, like a row of dominoes, one step every 70 milliseconds. Only the first burst of a chain stops the game, for a twentieth of a second, so you feel the thump without losing the beat. The shards fly out pale yellow and cool to orange, then dark red, as they fall.
Level 6: Stone Steps
Belfry Heights, the second corner of town, opens with Stone Steps and a new material: stone. Stone panes are gray, with a wavy mark like a seam in the rock, and they never break. You don’t need to clear them to win, either. A hit just knocks off three tiny gray crumbs and sends the Spark away at a new angle, which makes stone the best thing in town for bank shots.
The level is the foot of the bell tower: a stained-glass bell, with stone steps climbing up from both bottom corners. Behind the tower, the great clock keeps time with you. Its hands start at six o’clock and move toward seven as the glass comes down.
Level 7: Up the Ropes
When you reach the tower, Gaffer, the old talking streetlamp, warns you: “Whole town’s a clock up here. Everything moves. Watch the timing.” Up the Ropes is where glass starts to move. A gondola of glass hangs under the belfry beam and rides two cells to the left and two to the right, with a chime inside riding along. A full trip takes five seconds.
The gondola sits in a thin brass holder, and its rope is a dashed line with a little brass pulley at each end. The pulleys turn as the gondola rides. In the picture at the top, the Spark has just smashed a pane in the bottom row, and the teal pane below it glows as the shards fly past.
Level 9: Pull the Lever
The bell tower’s engine room brings levers and gates. A lever is a little rose of six glass petals on a brass arm, on an iron plate. It comes in two colors, blue with a moon in the middle or gold with a sun, and its gates come in the same color.
Hit a lever, and its arm swings over 60 degrees in 120 milliseconds while the petals light up, or go dark, in a wave. Every gate of its color switches at once: closed gates open, open ones close. Hit it again, and they switch back. A gate is a cast-iron grille with curled bars, and it opens like a shop shutter, sliding up in a quarter of a second. An open gate leaves a dashed outline behind, so you always know where it will drop back down.
Level 18: Odds and Ends
The Moon Dome is the last corner of town, and its third level is an astronomer’s study with a little of everything in it. In the middle stands a telescope on a rope lift, a column of glass with a chime inside, gliding one row up and down. The lift is this level’s one new trick. On either side spins a glass globe of eight panes on brass spokes, the two turning in opposite directions. At the bottom glows a brazier of ember glass, and four mirrors wait near the corners.
A mirror is an oval in a gold frame, silver inside, with a swirl in its pair’s color turning slowly in the middle. Each pair also has a small white sign, so twins match even if you can’t tell the colors apart. The Spark dives into one with a ripple and comes out of its twin with the same speed, in the same direction, ringed with circles.
Lantern Lane, the first five levels and the first boss, is free to play in your browser at panemonium.com. Belfry Heights, the Moon Dome and the rest of town come with the full game, all twenty levels, $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on the Panemonium page.
