SPIN Protocol

SPIN Protocol is a puzzle game about rotating nodes to redirect colored signals.

Each puzzle has signal sources and receptors of different colors, the goal is to activate every receptor while avoiding triggering security. I love laser/light puzzles and this game is very similar to them, it just uses nodes as a way to redirect instead of playing with light reflection.
The game overall is pretty easy, though it gets harder and better when color mixing and complex nodes/branching appear.

The major problem of SPIN Protocol is the wrong focus in the puzzle design. It’s one of those games in which the challenge doesn’t lie in completing the level, but in doing it in a limited amount of steps (in this case, rotations) and time.
Except perhaps for randomly generated puzzles, timers in puzzle games are never fun and always completely irrelevant. It’s just immediate memory and there’s nothing interesting in that, it’s annoying to replay the levels for nothing.

The step counter however isn’t always a bad idea. But there’s another major problem… there’s no undo button. Any error means you need to reset and that’s extremely frustrating. You can’t ask people to optimize levels without the necessary basic quality of life, that’s called artificial difficulty.
It also clashes with the few actually challenging levels that require a high number of minimum rotations (like 120). They are already tricky to solve, I don’t think anyone wants to optimize that, much less without an undo button.

Even though some mechanics were used in surprising ways near the end, there was more to do with them. When two different colored signals enter the same node, none of them can exit. Why is this only used once in one of the last levels? It’s just an example but there’s so much you can do with that, it was a very good eureka moment and could’ve introduced an entire chapter about it.

Anyway, SPIN Protocol isn’t a bad game. It’s just flawed like every small game and probably lacked playtesting and true feedback, but the puzzles are still largely fine.

---

Developers: Diego Spartano, Sebastian Spartano
Publishers: Diego Spartano, Sebastian Spartano
Platform: Steam – Windows
Release Date: January 31, 2025