I've spent most of my life surrounded by bridges, living beside oceans and bays and rivers that required me to cross them daily. But I never really knew what the engineering principles were, or how they worked—I simply trusted that they did.
After playing Poly Bridge, a physics-based game where you construct bridges to solve puzzles, I have concluded both that 1) no one should ever allow me to build a weight-bearing structure, and 2) it's a lot more fun than I anticipated.
In each level, you're given a certain amount of resources—concrete, wood, hydraulics—and tasked with building a bridge for a certain number of vehicles to cross. There's a tutorial that walks you through the basics (hint: it involves a lot of triangles) and it's simple enough to almost anyone to follow. Once the real game begins, however, it may take a lot of trial and error to figure out exactly how to get all those cars and motorbikes from point A to point B.
Sometimes you'll be limited by materials, other times only by your imagination. Sure, a ramp that launches motorcycles like projectiles across the water isn't the safest municipal construction decision, but it's definitely more fun. Other times you might construct wiggling suspension bridges, or drawbridges that contract when tugboats come chugging down the river.
I'm not particularly inclined towards engineering, so I wasn't sure how much I'd enjoy Poly Bridge. But the game holds your hand enough long enough to make you feel like you have the skills you need, and then lets you tweak and repeat as many times as you need to gain confidence in your own experiments. And rather than making you feel like a failure, sometimes watching your creations collapse spectacularly is as much fun as watching them succeed.
Poly Bridge is on sale for Windows, Mac and Linux from via Steam or the Humble store.
