GAZETRIX — Thirty paper routes through a city that fights back

What is GAZETRIX — Thirty paper routes through a city that fights back

GAZETRIX is a delivery game that slowly turns into a puzzle game. Ride the street forwards or backwards and throw a paper at every house flying a green flag; the houses with red plates cancel if you hit them. Miss a subscriber and they cancel too, and enough cancellations get you fired by the editor. That much is simple. What is not simple is everything the street puts between you and the next green flag.

Round switches open gates, and hitting a gate you did not open costs you a heart and four hundred points. Coloured gates only answer to a switch of the same colour, and the wrong switch releases a dog. Numbered houses have to be served in order, one, two, three, and a single mistake resets the sequence. Charge gates want you to hit plus and minus switches until a gauge matches a target, and every switch is single-use. Because you can ride backwards, none of these are dead ends — they are just problems you have to notice before you have already passed them.

How to play

1. Ride with the arrows or WASD in either direction. Space or J throws a paper and auto-aims at the nearest flag or switch; hold the key for a charged throw that reaches further.
2. Green flag means throw. Red plate means do not. Star houses pay triple, gold editions triple the next delivery, and the PAR clock at the top pays a large bonus if you finish under it.
3. Shift or K dashes with a brief moment of invincibility. Use it to pass through traffic and to escape dogs, which are leashed to a stretch of street and cannot follow you out of it.
4. Between routes you spend Ink on gear: a faster bike, longer throws, a deeper bag, an extra heart or an extra dash charge. The street gets meaner every route, so spend everything each morning.

Strategies that work

• Combos are the whole scoring system. Every fifth combo up to twenty gives you three papers, ten ink and three hundred points, so a clean run of deliveries pays more than the deliveries themselves. A single miss resets the chain, which makes the safe throw almost always the right throw.
• Papers stun. A thrown newspaper stops a dog, a drone or a pickpocket for a moment, and it costs one paper out of a bag you can refill by comboing. When a pickpocket appears, throw at it first and deliver second: the points it steals are worth more than the delivery you delayed.
• Read the gate before you reach it. Coloured gates and charge gates put their switches behind you as often as in front, and riding back for a switch costs perhaps four seconds. Ramming a closed gate costs a heart and four hundred points, which is closer to twenty seconds of route.
• On the numbered houses, do the counting before you throw anything. The auto-aim helps you and hurts you here: it will happily lock onto house two while you are riding towards house one. Slow down, stop level with the right house, and throw from a standstill.
• Buy the deep bag first. Every other upgrade makes a good run better, but running out of papers in the middle of a street is the thing that actually ends routes, and three extra papers covers the gap between combo bonuses on the later, longer maps.

A little history

The paper round is one of the oldest shapes in arcade games: a single street, a fixed direction, and a rhythm of small accurate throws. GAZETRIX keeps the rhythm and removes the fixed direction, and that one change is what turns it into a puzzle. Once you can ride backwards, a switch behind you is not a missed opportunity but a decision, and a gate becomes a lock with a findable key rather than a wall that punishes you for being slow. The newspaper setting does the rest of the work: a city that has forgotten how to read explains why every house needs convincing, why the gates are locked, and why the dogs have a union. In the daily challenge the whole route — houses, switches, dogs and gates — is rebuilt from the day's date, so everyone rides the same street.

Frequently asked questions