Home » Apps with tag ' puzzles'
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…
TelepaintHidden Gem of the Week: Blown Away
Blown Away: Secret of the Wind is a unique auto-running puzzle platformer from Black Pants Studio, that stabds out due to its vibrant art style and clever mechanics. Mother Nature has swept away Hendrik's home and hair; now he must travel a land of deadly gaps, monsters, and traps to retrieve them, using his pair of teleporting boots to leap past hazards Those boots provide the backbone for Blown Away's smartly-designed stages; your boots recharge their teleport with each step, and tapping on the screen teleports you to that location, even as you're falling to certain doom. The charging element is what turns a relatively simple mechanic into a puzzler. Your boots only charge w…
Letters become puzzle pieces in minimalist physics puzzler Supertype
Kamibox has been releasing an array of clever minimalist puzzlers over the last few years, between Zip-Zap, Cmplt, and others, and that trend looks to continue with the reveal of Supertype. The letter-based puzzler might also be the developer's most unique concept yet. Visually, Supertype may seem similar to games like Super Sharp and Sugar Sugar - manipulating objects to reach certain collectibles on each stage - but mechanically, its alphabet system looks wholly original. Rather than dragging blocks or slicking shapes and ropes, Supertype asks you to type letters onto the stage, which then physically interact with the environment. As demonstrated by the trailer, narrow Ls fall through g…
Death Coming brings cute-yet-violent puzzles to the App Store next week
The Final Destination series grossed out audiences with elaborate gory deaths for over a decade, but Death Coming takes a decidedly more charming approach to fatal Rube Goldberg scenarios when it released on iOS on March 13th. In this pixel-art puzzler, you are an agent of Death, orchestrating elaborate fatalities within sandbox levels where unsuspecting victims roam. Through observation, you must figure how to set up death traps. From crowded downtown streets to missile facilities where accident-prone scientists work, you’ll need to solve those bloody puzzles by manipulating the environment and altering people‘s behaviors, all while avoiding the watchful gaze of the angels th…
Hidden Gem of the Week: Knotmania
The zen puzzler is somewhat rare on mobile. Often many of the more minimalist games that avoid timers or other pressure still revolve around mechanics that can be challenging or tricky. The figurine winding of Zenbound and the silhouette construction of Shadowmatic fall into the category of simple, calmly paced puzzlers and so does this week’s hidden gem Knotmania. Rather than untying ropes or threads, Knotmania takes a more quirky approach: untangling living creatures, a twisted knot of squirming textured worms. Begin tugging and dragging and, as expected, they resist and twist away, moving in slow graceful movements as if through water or in zero gravity. With both a single worm o…
True Legacy tells a cyberpunk mystery through interactive fiction and puzzles
Since Blade Runner, cyberpunk and detective thriller have been entwined in numerous sci-fi works, even among mobile games with titles such as Gemini Rue. True Legacy adds a text adventure flair to the cyberpunk mystery, out now on iOS. As investigator Thornhill, you begin True Legacy looking into a mysterious death, an incident that leads across the game’s dystopian city and through its future of AI, machines, and genetics. Scrolling prose, complete with highlighted notes that provide more context about the world, drive the story forward as you make choices; reminiscent of Device 6, text might offshoot to the sides and other directions, revealing new information and other scene…
Rearrange a charming sci-fi adventure in Alike Studio's new puzzle game Bring You Home, out now on iOS
The autorunner is often a game of reaction and reflexes, timing your actions in sync with the character's forward movement. But Alike's newest iOS game Bring You Home turns the forward progress of the autorunner on its head, by tying it not to reflexes but to the cause and effect of an adventure game. Another cute and whimiscal sci-fi adventure, with a similar colorful aesthetic as its predecessor Love You To Bits, this game puts in the shoes of Polo, on a quest to rescue your kidnapped alien pet as you leap between portals in pursuit. But beween portals lies each stage of odd extraterrestial vignettes and other silly characters and interactions, that often end in your demise. Rewind, try…
Hidden Gem of the Week: Good Fences
Good Fences is an unasssuming little gem of a puzzler for iOS and Android, the kind you might not give a thought at a glance due to its simple aesthetic and mechanic that are hard to get across in screenshots. This geometric brain-teaser takes a very simple concept and wrings over a hundred challenges of shape placing and rotating out of that central mechanic. Take a look at that screenshot below, that is Good Fences at its simplest. Every stage presents you with a shape, and it's your job to surround it with copies of that same shape. It's such a basic seed of a puzzle concept, where even a less-complex shape can prove to be a tricky prospect to surround due to how corners and sides might…
The Room: Old Sins brings a new collection of eldritch puzzle boxes to iOS on January 25th
The Room series has grown with each entry for the single table of the first game to the multiple rooms and endings of the third. The next game looks to evolve the series again, when The Room: Old Sins launches on iPad and iPhone next Thursday. The core concept is still unlocking mysterious strucures and boxes through tactile puzzles, but Old Sins takes a new, and technically smaller, approach. Set within the halls and rooms of a dollhouse, you interact with the various areas and creations throughout, solving puzzles that can affect other rooms beyond the one you’re currently in. All manner of hidden compartments, disguised switches, and reality-bending eldritch designs await within…
Solve visual programming puzzles when While True: Learn() comes to iOS and Android in 2018
Mobile is no stranger to programming-based puzzlers, from Zachtronics’ early SpaceChem to the charming Human Resource Machine. But outside of TIS-100, most are abstractions of the concept; While True: Learn() promises an interesting approach, focused on placing you in the chair of a machine learning specialist, when the game launches on mobile this year. Acting with intent as a puzzle game and an educational tool, While True: Learn() presents you with problems themed around managing data and code for various tasks, and then gives you a toolbox of components to solve these logistical puzzles. It seems simple in execution - no actual coding, just dragging and connecting deci…
Secret Files Tunguska Review
There is a simple question to ask yourself before playing Secret Files Tunguska: if you wanted to eavesdrop on a conversation, would your first instinct be to sellotape a mobile phone to your target's cat? If the answer is yes, then Tunguska's puzzles will be second nature. However, if this confluence of events seems unreasonable, and trial-and-error seems like a chore, then this may not the point-and-click adventure for you. Fortunately, the touchscreen conversion of the o…
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