GAME: Brick'd

If you die your last body turns into a brick. You can then pick that brick up with new body and use it towards making a bridge. Repeat

— petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) January 25, 2013

I adore the notion of having insurmountable obstacles where dying is part of progressing, but if all we're doing with this is building a bridge, I don't see a lot of gameplay variety on the horizon. Maintaining the spirit of the GAME, however, I would suggest a platform game where the player builds the platforms and structures they will use out of these bricks. In each level, the goal point (a door or flag, etc) will initially be totally inaccessible. Whenever the player dies trying to reach it, however, their body becomes a brick, they respawn at the nearest checkpoint (often the start of the level), and can then return to the place where they died, pick up the brick, carry it to a useful location, and set it down, at which point it becomes a permanently fixed platform that they can use to bypass hazards and reach the goal.

In the interest of keeping things challenging, the player should not be able to die easily on most levels. Typical hazards should be stationary, so that the player has to seek them out in order to die, and so that retrieving the brick requires wandering through the same dangerous territory: flames, spikes, swinging blades, living enemies confined in small spaces, projectiles that fire along fixes trajectories. Also, there should be some hazards that don't yield a brick: if you fall down an infinite hole, so does the resulting brick, so it is irretrievable. If the player dies before placing their last brick, that brick crumbles to dust; replaced by the newly created one.

We also get to have some fun with brick properties: The player can only place bricks in locations that are within arm's reach of the player character, and bricks must be anchored to the ground or some existing structure. This way, to create interesting puzzles, we can have slippery surfaces in the level that won't hold a brick. In addition, we can play with bricks that have unusual properties, where particular deaths result in unique bricks:

• Charred bricks that crumble under the player's weight result from fire-deaths.
• Elongated bricks result from being crushed.
• Bricks that float on water result from drowning.
• Bricks that form moving platforms once placed result from being killed by a flying projectile?
• Bricks that can float in midair without support result from… something. I'm not that creative.
• Bricks that can be removed and placed repeatedly come from that doesn't happen often.

A few more thoughts: there could be a challenge mode where the player has limited lives, and thus limited bricks with which to complete a puzzle. I am also pondering the overarching story, which I think should be about retrieving magical bricks from the end of each level, which are used at the home-menu area to gradually assemble a magic rainbow bridge, as described in the tweet. But a bridge to where? And who is our intrepid protagonist? These story details need some attention.