I love open source and the sort of freedom it means for technology so it should be no surprise that I’ve run across a free game or two in my net travels. Krank is new to me and seems to run in the vein of more current indie titles. That is a simple game play mechanic diabolically implemented and blessed with some beautiful visuals.

From a game play standpoint Krank is simple. Nudge the physics based balls towards the stationary points on the screen. When they touch they link up. Pretty simple till you realize that balls moving to fast can bump other balls and disconnect them or that in some cases you may have to get strings of the them to connect between two stationary points. Sound simple? Not when momentum is involved.

The visuals aren’t ground breaking but they are still beautiful. With a combination of abstract images bright and colorful levels never seem bland. It will no doubt catch the eye of any one strolling by your computer.

A final note is on performance. It’s based on SDL and some times that can have some performance issues on Windows. For  me the game ran fine during a level but the transition from level to level was very slow(15-30sec). Not unplayable and as with any other open source project iteration should happen often and things should improve rapidly. I’m looking forward to spending some more time with this game.