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Hidden Gem of the Week: Yellow & Red
Bart Bonte's library of games is one of weird, quirky, tacitle puzzles, often with a focus on experimentation to discover rules and solutions. His two color-themed games Yellow and Red fit this design perfectly, offering myriad mininalist challenges. Both games feature 50 stages, all aesthetically themed as a black background overlaid by a puzzle in the games' corresponding color. Your goal is to fill the screen with a single color, but how you accomplish this goal is what makes Yellow and Red such enjoyable experiences. Every stage features a distinct rule, to be discovered and understand, to solve a puzzle; through experimental taps and swipes and observation, soon that rule or pattern…
AndroidMake Squares offers a clever twist on classic Tetris, available on iOS and Android
You know how to play Tetris: tetromino pieces falling from above, fitting them together to make rows, and so on. Make Squares takes those familiar pieces and delivers a unique variant that turns your understanding of the pieces and their relationship on its head. As you've probably guessed from the title, Make Squares tasks you with combining pieces into squares, and manipulating your growing central structure to catch falling tetrominoes. Most importantly, instead of rotating pieces, you rotate the larger structure, forcing you to consider orientation and how future pieces will dovetail with different sides. This change turns the familiar feeling of Tetris into a new spatial ch…
Sandbox racer Off The Road receives a gameplay trailer ahead of its July release
The upcoming Off The Road looks to capture the big jumps and hill climbing of arcade offroad racing with a sandbox approach that lets you freely switch between various vehicles, in this unique racer game launching next month on iOS and Android. From speedboat to jeep to big rig to helicopter, Off The Road teases a number of different vehicles to control across its open maps, Moving between vehicles in first person, you can choose them at your leisure, simply racing freely over hills or testing your skills in challenges. Coins to collect and tricky missions like cargo hauls or narrow speedways snaking through mountaintops supplement Off The Road's sandbox design. Off The Road will b…
Paperbark promises an illustrated adventure following a sleepy wombat when it releases on June 21st
iOS has been home to more than a few relaxing, unorthodox adventure games, like the follktales of Burly Men At Sea and the text-based design of Pry. Paperbark looks to follow in those footsteps with charming story of a wombat in Australia. Guiding the stumbling gait of a cute wombat, Paperbark tasks you with exploring the underbrush and wilderness of Australia. Described as a "short story", this adventure presents its environments in an detailed watercolor aesthetic inspired by iconic landscape paintings, as you travel to new locations through the hazy summer heat. Complementing the natural journey is an interactive library detailing the Australian Bush, teaching players about the…
World of Demons' gameplay trailer showcases stylish swordplay and painted monsters
Platinum Games revealed World of Demons last month, but this new trailer gives us a better idea of its touch-based gameplay and showes off its vibrant aesthetic more clearly. Perhaps most interestingly was the glimpse of the larger marco game of collecting minions in your "deck", to enhance and unleash in battle. Each minion brings their own style to combat; once you're on the open battlefields, players must wield magic attacks like rings of flame and slicing wind alongside special attacks that can hit multiple foes or strike for fierce damage. Fourteen minutes video of gameplay with developmer commentary is also available online (courtesy of IGN), providing a longer look at the ev…
Hidden Gem of the Week: Barrier X
Barrier X puts you in control of a vessel rocketing through an endless expanse at insane velocities, as white barriers appear with alarming speed. The ground beneath your craft turns orange as a visual warning of an upcoming barrier, giving you just enough of a warning to shift right or left and evade destruction by mere moments. It's breathless relentless action, as barriers fly past, barely a blur as you rocket onward. Survive for 15 seconds, and your reward is to go faster, an increase in speed. 30 seconds, and you unlock a new level, while 60 seconds masters that level, a true test of reflexes and reaction. Barrier's slick polished design and wonderful sense of speed would be enough t…
Battle otherworldly beasts in atmospheric action-platformer Feist
Feist probably might remind you of Limbo at a glance, with its shadowed aesthetic and woodland environments, but that's where the similarities end. Rather than puzzles, Feist is all about intense brawls with relentless creatures. You're a small fuzzy being, captured by a larger species but able to escape into the hostile wilderness. At every turn, new threats lurk - vicious stinging insects, towering mole-like beasts, swarming spiders - and the only things between you and death are your agility and quick reflexes. As you leap around charging monsters, branches and pine cones become your desperately improvised weapons, giving you just enough breathing room to outmanuever and decide your ne…
Hexologic offers a colorful new variant of Sudoku-style puzzles
Logical deductions are what you need to solve Hexologic's number-based puzzles. In its increasingly tricky challenges, you must fill in its hexagonal grids with the right numbers in the right places, a task harder than it sounds. Each stage in Hexologic is crafted from connected hexagons, with numbers at the ends of rows; you need to place dots within those hexagons so they add up to the numbers. The headscratching comes from the fact that dots can interact along multiple diagonals, so figuring how where to place the correct number of dots without messing up sums horizontally or vertically can become a test of planning steps ahead. Hexologic gradually introduces new mechanics through…
Dodge stellar obstacles in the upcoming arcade game Super Starfish
Space offers a gorgeous and dangerous gauntlet in Super Starfish, an arcade evasion game in development for iOS and Android. Controlling an agile cosmic fish, you must swim through the galaxy, dodging planets and other hazards along the way. The recently releases teaser trailer showcases a number of different obstacles you'll need to evade during Super Starfish's gameplay, from shifting planets to raining crystals. Later stages will feature more aggressive dangers, such as intermittent laser blasts that force you frantically weave around the incoming beams. Overcoming this reflex-testing challenges will reward you with various collectables, to unlock other celestial creatures to control…
Minesweeper Genius combines the logical challenges of Picross and Minesweeper, available on iOS and Android
Minesweeper and Picross (and Picross-inspired games) have more than a few variants on mobile, but Minesweeper Genius blends elements of the two to create a charming and clever puzzle hybrid. Reminiscent of how Swap Sword had you navigating a character through a match-3 grid, Minesweeper Genius turns each stage into a maze of mines to manuver through, guiding broom-wielding genius Aristotle through a gauntlet of science experiments step-by-step. Similar to Picross games, numbers on the rows and colums allow you to logically deduce which tiles are either rigged to blow or safe to walk along; Minesweeper-style markers also provide additional information as the randomly-generated puzzles…
Take flight and dodge traps in physics-based vehicle platformer Animal Super Squad
Animal Super Squad is a new vehicle platformer taking cues from the absurd physics and big ramps of the Trials series, swapping helmeted rider with reckless animals in slapdash machines on wheels. There's no motorcylce to master here; instead you choose between a daring fish, chicken, or sloth and then race along arcadey tracks in different vehicles, each with their own style to learn. The hover truck and the toilet on wheels are going to control differently enough, but either way, Animal Super Squad has you boosting and flipping through gravity deftying tracks, activating switches to destroy or change parts of the upcoming roadway. Of course, you might also be launched out of…
Hidden Gem of the Week: Telepaint
Combining easy controls with tricky space-bending puzzles, Telepaint's format is simple: you're a paint bucket trying to reach a waiting brush, auto-walking between portals that you can link to teleport around levels. Activating these portals are the core of Telepaint's puzzles, requiring timing and planning to survive hazards and tricky puzzle elements. While the automatic movement may sound like more of a hectic element, Telepaint lets you pause the time and manipulate portal while stopped, giving you as much time is needed to consider what direction you'll exit portals, how that direction will make you bump off walls, how you'll interact with certain obstacles. Early levels only requir…
Narrative-driven puzzler G30 tells the story of a fading memory through clever challenges
G30 might seem obtuse at glance, but its colorful artful aesthetic is the backdrop for an ambitious and clever puzzle game that uses its mechanics to deliever a human tale. Colored lines connect with jigsaw pieces, switching between various design as you drag on the line. With drag, you piece together a shape, and with each correct shape, G30's story unfolds on the screen. It's a narrative about a fading memory, about remembering and consciousness, and your puzzle solving brings new context to the text. Its minimalst art style and piecemeal story structure is designed with intent, attempting to represent the nature of remembering fragments of memories, snapping into place and revealing th…
Q-Games' Eden Obscura is swinging onto iOS on May 18th
The artistically abstract and arcade-y agile Eden Obscura is releasing soon on mobile, bringing Q-Games' unique Pixeljunk style and satisfying swinging to iOS later this week, according to the developers on Twitter. Eden Obscura is an enhanced and updated successor Q-Games' Pixeljunk Eden, designed with mobile in mind; the floral landscapes and graceful swinging remains, now with a useful double jump and a unique feaure that uses your phone's camera to create dynamic and atmosphere backgrounds to navigate through. With each gossamer grapple and planted seed, your agile movement through the world brings it to life with growing structures to swing even higher in your quest to collect specia…
Scalak is an unorthodox cubic puzzler from the developer of Zenge and Art of Gravity, releasing this month on iOS and Android
Developer Michal Pawlowski's roster of puzzle games all share the traits of being visually unique and relaxingly paced, and the upcoming Scalak looks like a welcome addition among past titles like Zenge and Push. At its most basic, Scalak look reminiscent of a 3D jigsaw puzzle, challenging you to fit oddly-shaped pieces onto cubic structures. In the trailer, a wide variety of puzzle types are shown, each one building upon that concept in different ways: filling in gaps on surfaces with shaped tiles, rotating sections of cubic levels so special tiles will fit with the correct orientation, and even placing girder-like construction across a structure's vertices. And like his past games, Scal…
