Color Knitzy © Copyright by Gamdise Do not Reproduce. By Lily

Color Knitzy is the game that at long last makes rhythmic mesmerizing knitting into an adventure. Instead of just purling and cabling for real life, you steer a character called Knitzy, which is a little ball of sentient yarn, around landscapes that appear to be what would happen if someone unleashed all the scarves in the world and let them spill across the sky. Each layer is a floating swatch of fabric sewn together by zippers, buttons and half-finished mittens the size of soccer stadiums. The gaps between panels aren't, as he thought at first, the latest abyss to reveal itself on Improbable Island.

Thankfully, the world continues to drop new colors to fill your gullets. Secret needles tucked in yarn-bombed treasure chests splice permanent color upgrades into your strand — fiery crimson that melts icy obstacles, cool indigo that congeals into bounce pads, sunny yellow that carries electricity across neon signs. Mixing hues on the fly also unlocks new physics functions: A green overlay on purple lattice stretches like rubber, allowing you to slingshot around giant sewing pins; a gold-and-silver pattern contracts into armor that can be walked across for a moment so you can stomp along turrets barely the size of thimbles but capable of snipping apart your existence. The game's chromatic grammar is established in such an organic way that you feel like a textile alchemist, inventing combos they insist were never coded because the thread simulation assumes tension, twist and hue are going to function as real fibers do.

Halfway between sections you'll take refuge in the Yarn Café, a snug little oasis sewed onto the rear of a patient tortoise who's plodding its way through this quilted desert. Here, you exchange gathered buttons for cosmetic “patterns” that don't affect stats but allow you to sashay through co-op battles as a fair-isle ninja or crocheted cactus. Friends can drop in asynchronously, leaving ghost paths of their own color runs; battle with your outline to the exit and you'll share a jackpot of bonus spools. Weekly community events deliver the same blank tapestry to everyone playing anywhere in the world — last month we collectively darned a 4-million-pixel sunset that will hang in the hub forever, proof that thousands of strangers can still weave something gentle together.

Boss fights attempt to literalize the tension in every crafting project. A monstrous seam-ripper known as Ravel comes swooping in like a steel pterodactyl, cutting rows you've just laid down and making you darn faster than he can cut. The trick, it seems, is to guess where he's going to slash next, pre-knit a reinforcing double strand and see his blade catch on your reinforced patch with a jarring and hissing snarl. Winning doesn't feel as much like conquest, but more like completing a complicated sweater: the joy of seeing chaos woven into neat stitches.

Color Knitzy ends when you at last mend the gaping stitch we plunged through to be born, a hole so big it swallows half the sky. You could just thread right through the closing loop and activate the credits, but most players will pause to knit silly rainbows across the void, because for once a game is making creation seem like the bravest stunt of all.

Color Knitzy is a relaxed puzzle game from the creator of Quell that sees players untangling and arranging threads in mazes that prove both simple and complex to unravel. The game shows players a screen of multicolored strings at the top, and they must wind these strings on to spools of corresponding colors situated beneath them. Every level is a web of strings and you have to meticulously drag the right coloured implement to go with each string, for example, red strings can only be wound by red spools. For success, players can buy extra tools (all are offered in multiple colors), and then set them out so strings sort without overlapping or looking jumbled.

Gameplay is very casual and slow paced, no timers or pressure to hurry through. It means that players get to try out various strategies and see how the threads lace together, in order to concentrate on creating practical loops instead. With each level, the difficulty increases as they add more colors and intricate patterns which need even more attentiveness and strategy. After all, the pleasure of completing a level should be in making the bright colors all fit together neatly with gentle chimes and smooth flicking motions to relax and enjoy.