What is MAKARA — Fifty temple trials, one whip, and a bridge at the end
MAKARA is a top-down adventure that hides a block-pushing puzzle inside an action game. Dr. Rex Calloway crashes a banquet at the Palace of Rasavar and finds that the palace has stolen the bloodstones of the mountain villages. Below the marble halls, a skull-painted cult sacrifices villagers to a dark goddess and works children in the mines. Fifty trials run from the courtyard, through the temple and the mine, into the flooded depths and out onto the bridge, where the high priest is waiting.
Every level asks the same three things in different proportions. Find the bloodstone. Free the caged children, which needs a key that is usually behind a fight. Reach the exit, which is usually behind a sealed gate that only opens when stone blocks sit on golden plates — and the whip cannot break stone blocks, so the only tool is your shoulder. The zones change what surrounds that structure: spikes on a cycle in the temple, darkness in the mine, rising water in the depths, and a mine-cart chase that turns the whole thing into a timing test.
How to play
- Move with WASD or the arrows and aim the whip with the mouse. On a touch screen, the left half of the screen is a virtual stick and the right half is whip and jump.
- The dodge roll makes you briefly invincible and is the only reliable answer to a cult charge. It has a short recovery, so roll through an attack rather than away from it.
- Press the interact key beside a cage to free a child, if you are carrying a key. Each child freed is five hundred points, and there is no penalty for leaving one behind except the score.
- Push stone blocks with your body onto the golden plates. A block against a wall cannot be pulled, and the whip will not move it, so look at the plate first and choose which side of the block to stand on.
Strategies that work
- Spikes run on a fixed cycle of about two and a half seconds and they are never random. Stand one tile away and watch one full cycle before you commit; crossing a four-tile spike corridor is a single rolled dash timed off the retraction, not four careful steps.
- The whip has reach and the cult does not. Almost every cultist in the first three zones can be beaten by backing up one tile and attacking, because your range is longer than theirs. The exceptions are the elite guards, who close the distance in one move and have to be rolled through.
- In the mine, light is a resource. The darkness hides pits as well as enemies, and a torch does not follow you forever. Learn the room in the light you have, then cross it from memory rather than trying to move and see at the same time.
- The time bonus at the end is five thousand points minus five per second elapsed, so it is gone entirely after about sixteen minutes. Freeing every child on fifty levels is worth twenty-five thousand. If you are chasing the leaderboard, free the children and stop exploring.
- The boss dies to patience, not damage. Molkazar telegraphs each attack and is only vulnerable in the pause afterwards, and the ropes on the bridge matter more than your whip does. Cut the rope the fight is pointing you at, and let the gorge do the work.
A little history
The nineteen-thirties temple adventure is a very specific shape: a hat, a whip, a rolling boulder and a rope bridge, and every game that borrows it has to decide what it is actually about. MAKARA decides on the blocks. Underneath the spikes and the cult, this is a game about looking at a sealed gate, finding the plates, and working out which side of each stone you need to be standing on — a puzzle that has been in games since the earliest warehouse games and does not need explaining to anyone. The action layer exists to stop you thinking calmly, and the mine-cart chase exists to break the rhythm before it becomes a habit. In the daily challenge the fifty layouts are rebuilt from the day's date, so the block puzzles you are looking at are the same block puzzles everyone else is looking at that day.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to free the children?
No. The exit opens whether or not the cages are empty. Each child is five hundred points, though, and fifty levels of skipped cages is a large hole in a leaderboard run.
I pushed a block into a corner and the gate will not open. Now what?
Restart the level from the pause menu. You keep your score and your progress through the fifty trials, and only the current level resets. Blocks can never be pulled, so a cornered block is permanent.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes. MAKARA has a virtual stick on the left half of the screen and whip and jump on the right, and the block pushing works the same with a thumb as with a keyboard.
