6-Sided Stories is a cute and calming puzzle game made in Hochelaga

6-Sided Stories is a casual and calming puzzle game where you unscramble cute pixel-art images that tell a wholesome story.

The first level is about a cat helping a mouse steal cookies. Flip hexagonal tiles horizontally, vertically or invert their colour. It doesn’t get much cozier than this: there is no fail state, there’s a generous hint system and the gameplay uses absolutely no text, making it accessible to players of all languages and literacy levels — all with some very chill beats playing in the background.

6-Sided Stories is the second title from Hochelaga-Maisonneuve-based studio DarZal Games. Founded in 2023, the two-person team previously released Quest Giver, which they developed for a holiday game jam. “Quest Giver was heavily inspired by Papers, Please but (was) set in a humorous fantasy world since we didn’t want heavy subject matter for the holidays,” says Darzington, one half of the DarZal Games team.

Moving on to 6-Sided Stories was a more pragmatic decision for the studio. “One of the biggest factors was that we wanted to prototype some game mechanics for our next game in a smaller environment,” explains Darzington. “6-Sided Stories will be contributing its hexagon grid (with controller support), gameplay statistics collection and web demo code to our next project.” 

In-game analytics and data collection aren’t anything new in game development, but are certainly an innovative way to test your next game’s mechanics. Darzington clarifies: “When you finish a puzzle in 6-Sided Stories, our system notes which puzzle piece was the last and how long it took: this anonymous data is then aggregated with all other players’ data so we can find out if a particular piece is too tricky, and adjust the image. We aim to make our next project more gameplay-heavy with better replayability, and so we’ll be relying heavily on statistics for balancing.”

While the studio has been busy releasing games, DarZal aren’t yet making game dev their full time jobs. Darzington does all her programming by voice, while Zalinus is a ‘regular’ software developer.

Darzington uses an open-source program called Talon Voice. “Unsurprisingly, I’m not the first programmer to have hand/wrist issues, and I’m so grateful that people who came before me set up this awesome system.” Darzington uses the highly customizable software to code her own scripts, allowing her to achieve whatever she wants. “I think the best command that I’ve coded is: in the morning when I say “let’s make games,” my computer launches all the software I need to start developing. It feels cool every time.”

Darzington acknowledges the rich indie dev ecosystem that Montreal has to offer. “With a number of universities around, there’s always a game jam going on and there are so many awesome game dev communities.” She identifies two standout groups: the yearly GAMERella jams (happening Nov. 23–24 this year) and the Pixels & Poutine Discord community. “In university, GAMERella genuinely gave me the courage to believe that I could be a game developer, and now I return each year as a mentor for the jam.”

“Pixels & Poutine is a chat group for more ‘advanced’ indie developers, people who are trying to do (game dev) as a career. Sharing resources with other people who are doing the same thing as me and just chatting at the monthly meetups makes the whole ‘tiny indie studio’ endeavor feel less lonely.” ■

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6-Sided Stories is available now on Steam. This article was originally published in the Nov. 2024 issue of Cult MTL.

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