Core is a series of five Flash games developed by John Feltham between 2007 and 2010, centering on a titular Power core in varying environments, usually with complex puzzles to solve in the process.
The episodes are:
The Core series contains examples of:
- 100% Completion: In Soul Core, getting your companion's soul value to 100% nets you the "Super Cute Ending".
- Alien Invasion: The plot of the final game, Tower Core, revolves around charging a giant laser turret to destroy an alien scout ship.
- Data Crystal: The fourth game features crystal data discs.
- Dilating Door: The entrance to the Prism Lab in the third game, as well as the cover to nearly every power core socket.
- Fox-Chicken-Grain Puzzle: In the fifth game, the final puzzle of the Tech tower is this. Four alien creatures and a can of radioactive materials have to be moved from one cell to another, without any of them dying.
- The Future: The fourth game reveals that you are in the year 2733 Ad
- Give Me Your Inventory Item: In Tower Core, to pass a gate, you have to sacrifice your teleporter watch to a god. Luckily, you can fix it.
- Incredible Shrinking Man: Cube Core has a tube that shrinks or enlarges you at the push of a button, allowing you to become small enough to explore inside the cube.
- LEGO Genetics: The second and third games include machines that can create life forms by injecting varying amounts of genetic materials into a petri dish.
- Light and Mirrors Puzzle: The giant prism in Prism Core can be rotated to varying colors, some of which are required for certain puzzles.
- Matter Replicator: The TRANSMAT machine in the third and fifth game, capable of taking raw materials and building them into items, even from photographs and Info-Goggles.
- Meaningful Name: Your given name in the fourth game is Subject XY, relating to your male gender.
- Multiple Endings: Prism Core gives you three unique items to pick at the beginning, which determine the type of puzzles you solve. Two of them lead out into the sewers, but the final, most complex path leads to the start of Soul Core.
- Night-Vision Goggles: A variant in Tower Core with the Info-Scan goggles, capable of analyzing various things in the environment.
- Ominous Cube: Cube Core, naturally, centers on a giant white cube that needs a power core to operate.
- Our Time Machine Is Different: The Chronoporter in Soul Core, which transports chunks of land depending on the date and coordinates. You largely use it to retrieve mundane objects from the past.
- Queens Puzzle: The Tower of Spirit in Tower Core contains this, with five discs to be arranged in the N=6 format.
- Solve the Soup Cans:
- The first three games are relatively justified, being part of a training program to prove your worth. The fourth even requires creating a female companion to run through the same gauntlet.
- Played straighter with Tower Core, given how much time it takes to solve puzzles to reach every energy source.
- Shout-Out: Your clothing and that of your companion's highly resemble Luke Skywalker's outfit.
- Super Wrist-Gadget: Your watch in the 5th game, which controls a teleporter between Earth and a distant planet.
- The Reveal: Soul Core opens with a holographic message explaining that you are Subject XY, an artificial human created to be immune to the radioactive dust caused by a passing meteor.
- Tomato in the Mirror: You finally see your reflection in a mirror in Soul Core. Your hair and eye color are also randomly different per play.
- You Wake Up in a Room: The first two games give shades of this, with sterile white walls and strange machinery all around you. Soul Core reveals these to be VR simulations you were put under.
