Posted January 01, 2026 by LaptopCoder11
The blue/orange of the color palette made me think of polarity switching and portals, so I made a puzzle that combined both of those mechanics in an interesting way that I personally haven't really seen done before.
Originally, it was more complex (The goal was 3x3 and the grid was larger) but I decided to distill it down to just require the the main ideas needed to solve it.
The first iteration didn't have the relativity of the portal exits, and was nearly possible to solve but wasn't due to parity (blocks were stuck on specific paths). It was so close to being solvable, so I wanted to only slightly adjust the mechanic to fix the parity issue.
The first idea was some sort of "parity tile" that just flipped the polarity of the box without it having to go through a portal but this felt a bit clunky, and didnt even fix the issue.
So the next idea I had was that you could press a key and the portal would flip, but then that felt a bit weird as only one of them would change, and required having an extra keyboard button.
Lastly, a playtester suggested having the exits of the portals be relative to the centerpoint of the intersection, which is what ended up in the final puzzle, since it was an elegant solution without adding any new mechanics and with only a slight adjustment to the ruleset.
One problem that still arose was that you could just stack straight to the goal, then break the stack by just moving a portal to the middle of it. This was fixed by not allowing portals to be entered if there was a block on the other side (where it would go if there wasn't a portal), this did feel a bit unintuitive but it solved the issue. Update 1 added some visual indicators to hopefully slightly alleviate this feeling.
I did realise after the fact that the bonus goal (getting the goal all the same color) might actually be slightly easier than the normal goal oops :)
The bonus goal was a holdover from when the goal was 3x3 instead of 2x2 which actually did make it more difficult, compared to how it currently is only a slight variation in the solution.
Overall, I'm happy with how it turned out and I hope you enjoyed!
(Solution video)