Quell Review

By , on August 18, 2010


Quell+
Download on the AppStore
4 out of 5

PROS

  • Simple to learn, hard to solve puzzles.
  • Built in hint system.
  • Beautiful soft graphical style.
  • Multiple profiles to share with friends.

CONS

  • Challenging to finish even with hints available.

VERDICT

Quell is a beautifully relaxing puzzle title to delve in to and even when things get rough it's easy to get lost in the moment and just play for the sake of chilling out.


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'Relaxed' doesn't even begin to describe the experience of playing Quell by Fallen Tree Games, but it's certainly how I felt when playing this wonderfully simple and atmospheric logic puzzler.

In each level your aim is to collect all the available 'pearls', avoiding traps as you keep sliding until you hit a wall. It's not a new concept by any means, but additional puzzle elements such as being able to warp from one side of the screen to the other makes things much harder to keep track of, especially when aiming for perfect runs. Moving around is intuitive enough and only requires swiping to set your droplet in motion, stopping only once its hit a barrier.

However it's the calming presentation of the whole package that really makes Quell shine. The pastel designs are soft, but also balanced by soft tinkling chimes when you succeed and a constantly changing background horizon. Better yet, frustration is also alleviated by the addition of 'hint tokens' that can be spent to give one possible solution, with more tokens being earned as you complete further puzzles.

Finishing Quell can be quite a hard task, but certainly not a frustrating one and while the puzzle concept may not be terribly new it's one that puzzle fans can jump in to and simply enjoy from start to finish.

Screenshots

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