Engare Download PC

Engare is a puzzle game created by Iranian game designer Mahdi Bahrami and soundtracked by Mim Rasouli, playable on PC and MacOS. Describing itself as "a game about motion and geometry", Engare's design is based upon Islamic art and sacred geometry. The game consists of two gameplay modes: a puzzle-solving mode, where the player has to recreate shapes shown onscreen by placing a point on a moving object, akin to a Spirograph tool, and a free-form art tool allowing the player to design their own patterns. First prototyped in 2010, Engare was released in October 2017, and retails for $6.99 on Steam and Bahrami's website. The game's release was delayed by difficulties caused by international sanctions imposed upon Iran, making it difficult for Bahrami to travel and access resources.

Background

Bahrami has described the influences behind both the game's aesthetics and mechanics. The traditional Islamic geometric patterns featured in the game are widespread in Iran, and particularly in Bahrami's hometown of Isfahan, including the central Naqsh-e Jahan Square, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The game's mechanic was inspired by a question asked by Bahrami's high-school geometry teacher, when he asked students to imagine what shape would be traced by a point fixed to a ball when rolled across a flat surface - the result being a series of loops. Bahrami explains that even students who did not understand geometry were interested in the answer to this puzzle, and he was interested in using Engare to "explore mathematics in different ways ... for some people it's easier to explore maths when it's visualised," and that "video games as a medium have great potential for these visualisations."  Despite this, Bahrami says, he did not originally set out to make an educational game. The game is Bahrami's second to be inspired by traditional Islamic patterns, following Farsh, a game inspired by Persian carpets, which his mother wove when he was growing up.

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