Async Corp is the latest, and probably last release from indie developer house Powerhead Games. There are many reasons to mourn Powerhead’s departure, the biggest of which is that Async Corp. is a marked improvement over Glow Artisan, its award winning predecessor. While Glow was a wonderful concept, Async demonstrates some of the fundamental qualities of the all time classic puzzle games.
In Async Corp, players are given two wells filled with squares of three different colors. Players select one square on each side to swap with each other in order to form a packet. Packets are generated whenever some number of same-colored squares are arranged in the shape of a rectangle (squares being rectangles too, of course). The rules of the game state that a swap can only occur if it will create at least one packet, and packets themselves can be cleared off the screen by touching them (clearing packets becomes, ultimately, the point of the game). → Read the rest