As someone who dedicates most of his life to obeying strange and esoteric rules that make no sense to anyone, you bet I was intrigued by Yawnoc, a newly released roguelike where you roam around a forest destroying machines “living on the rules of Conway’s Game of Life and other cellular automata.”

If you have no idea what that means, then you are my brother and comrade, but I’ve spent a solid several minutes looking at a Wikipedia page and a bit longer actually playing Yawnoc, and I think I’ve just about figured it out.

Basically, imagine a big old grid of squares, then colour as many of those squares in as you like. Start the clock, and the squares adjacent to the ones you colour in will fill, then the ones adjacent to those, then the ones adjacent to those, while older ones die off.

Some starting positions will produce stability—a set of squares moving according to a predictable pattern that neither grows nor shrinks. Some will grow infinitely. Some might disappear? Maybe? Not actually sure about that one. You can see a few examples of the principle in action here and in a gif I’ve embedded below.

Regardless, you’ve basically got the idea in your head now, and it’s the same principle that enemies in Yawnoc’s very much limited, wave-based combat zones live by. You run around blasting them with upgradeable abilities and guns but, should you blast the wrong square out of a pattern, you change the entire logic of the enemy’s overall growth, potentially sending them into hyperdrive.

Which is a great way to generate untold chaos and to punish me, specifically, for not actually thinking about how I blast away foes. Even in my limited time with the game—I’m yet to surmount the first boss—I’ve had a couple of instances where an enemy has suddenly gotten absurdly big because I’m a big dumb idiot who should not be trusted with firearms or responsibility. Or responsibility for firearms.

If that sounds like your kind of weird jam, Yawnoc is out today, and is currently running a 10% launch discount that brings it down to a trifling $4.50 (£3.86). You can find it on Steam, and its free demo-ish “jam version” on Itch.io.