Storked: a penguin puzzle game for Windows

A stork carrying an egg comes down over the Antarctic, and four flightless birds have to get the egg to safety. Each has a different capability, and the puzzle is deciding which one is needed where. Character-swapping puzzles live or die on whether the abilities are distinct enough to make the choice obvious in hindsight and non-obvious in advance, and a hundred levels is a serious commitment to that idea.

One word in the description carries more design weight than the rest of it. The egg is rolled, not carried — so the object that must reach the exit is a physical thing subject to the same slopes and obstacles as the birds pushing it, and it is not the thing the player controls. That is a harder puzzle than moving an avatar to a door, because every action has to be planned around something that keeps moving after you stop pushing it, and it is why four distinct abilities are needed rather than one bird with four moves.

A Spanish download portal that deep-linked to this address records the game at version 2.0, which is a more informative number than it looks. A second major version means somebody rewrote rather than patched, and it fits the other evidence of maintenance on this page: two independent signs that this title was still being worked on when most of the catalogue around it had been left alone.

It is one of the leaner entries in this audit on provenance — one listing, one description, no publisher credit — and one of the clearer ones on design. The record establishes what the game was; it does not establish who made it or where it went.

The distribution was the standard shape of the period: a Windows demo, a registration purchase, and a listing on at least one software portal, which is how this archive's single external reference to the page arose. Portal listings were how a game with no press coverage found buyers, and for several titles here they are the only trace outside this archive.

The system requirements are worth reading as a date stamp rather than as a specification. The list runs Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP and Vista, and Vista is the informative entry: it did not exist when most of the pages in this archive were written, so its presence means this listing was still being maintained after the others had been left alone. That is a small piece of evidence about the game and a larger one about the site — a page that was updated is a page somebody still expected to sell from. The advertised scale, over a hundred levels, sits alongside it as the other figure the record actually carries.

Established: the four-character mechanic, the level count as advertised, the Antarctic setting, and the date this site covered it. Not established: publisher, author, release year, or current availability. The design is well recorded and the provenance is not, which is the common pattern among the smaller entries here.