Wowie Jam 2.0: Com_Pute

“Com_Pute” by Marc-André Doré & Nicolas Pelletier.

“Play the [bug], destroy the [computer]. […] [Destroy] every component in your path! But watch out, you [do not want to] run out of memory or even make a power surge. Who knows what a little dragonfly can do to a computer nowadays. Watch out for the new generation of [central processing units], [they] can destroy you!”


In “Com_Pute”, you play as a dragonfly on a rampage tour inside a computer. Your only goal is to destroy as many components possible while staying alive, as the elements recognize you as a literal bug and fight back. While this scenario premise may sound pretty familiar to you, the gameplay is still surprising and well implemented: Whenever one part of the computer disappears, it has an immediate consequence for the game itself.

Crushing the internal speaker? A sequence of beeping noises will be added to the background music. Eliminating the clock? Congratulations, now you no longer are able to see how long you already played “Com_Pute”. While these are mostly audiovisual gimmicks, there is more in store. For example, if you knock out all the memory sticks of the machine, it is an instant game over. So you cannot just carelessly shoot around without taking a look at the actual status.

In my opinion, “Com_Pute” has an enormous potential to be created into something bigger. It is easy to imagine even more side effects of the attacks, like shooting at the graphics card could result in more glitches or at least in a darker area. But even now as a jam submission it already is a juicy mix between the shooter and metagame genres, which rewards the spirit of discovery of its players with various endings. And who knows – maybe you can even get to the boss battle? [PLAY]