Home » Apps with tag 'puzzler'
Devolver Digital's colorful new puzzler Umiro releases on iOS and Android
New Devolver-published puzzler Umiro was once called Recolor, and you can see why from screenshots and footage. Not only is it a game of vibrantly colorful isometric stages, its dual character gameplay pits your heroes against roaming colorless orbs in a quest to bring back color to the world. Each stage of Umiro places you control of Huey and Satura, challenging you to draw paths for both toward red and blue crystals through gauntlets of gates, switches, and black spheres. Once you press play, both characters will follow their paths automatically, so figuring out the order of their movements, when they need to pause for a moment or activates switches at the right time, is key to sol…
AndroidHidden Gem of the Week: Blackbox
Blackbox's unassuming first impressions presents the player with a black background and colored squares, but as you begin to explore its puzzles, Blackbox reveals itself to be something unique special: a puzzle games where none of its challenges are solved by interacting with the screen, but instead with every other sensor and function on your phone.. Other games like The Room have used touch controls to let player tactilely manipulate with items and puzzle boxes, but this game's clever twist turns the phone itself into a puzzle box, where experimenting with its different switches and features is how you discover solutions. Rotating your device, interacting with volume buttons…
Colorful puzzler Nano Golf is Nitrome's newest release on iOS and Android
Nitrome's bread and butter has always been its quirky interesting puzzlers and arcade games, and their newly published game Nano Golf looks to continue that trend. With each course being a tight mini-puzzle and with only a limited number of strokes, this golf puzzler brings varied physics-based golf challenges to iOS and Android. Nano Golf's vivid pixel art courses start off relatively simply, not much different than commom mini golf stages with hills and windmills. But then speed boosting areas get introduced, with myriad other mechanics to follow, from golf carts chasing behind your ball to portals and switches and ghost copies of your ball and spikes and much more. While you might be a…
Hidden Gem of the Week: Perfect Paths
If you've played the (sadly no longer available) port of SpaceChem or the rail-drawing puzzler Trainyard, Perfect Paths may feel familiar despite its potential confusing UI and mechanics. Much like those, this is a methodical logic-based puzzle game, challenging you to splice together nodes amid limited space. At its most basic level, your goal is actually quite simple. All you have to do is move the colored blocks onto the similar-colored tiles on the grid. This is a game of step-by-step planning, of counting turns and meticulously setting up your commands and paths. It's the kind of game where, once you know how all the elements work together, you could succeed on your first try if you…
Hidden Gem of the Week: SPL-T
Simogo's games - from Year Walk to text-twisting Device 6 - are defined by how they use the touch interface to deliver unique narrative experiences. At a glance, the high score-chasing nature of SPL-T doesn't appear to be a Simogo title, but as you learn its rules, the game reveals itself to be as unique as any of their other games. Your first attempt at SPL-T is likely to be confusing; its gameplay seems as simple as its minimal appearance. The core concept to understand as that you earn points by splitting the screen into halved blocks. These halves alternate between horizontal and vertical splits, and by dividing an area into four or more equally-sized blocks, they become marked with a…
Cops and robbers gets a strategic upgrade in upcoming puzzler City Cops
At a glance, City Cops may seem reminiscent of railway puzzlers like Mini Metro and Trainyard, but rather than guiding and creating tracks, this puzzle game tasks you With outmaneuvering and catching bad guys. Each stage of City Cops presents you with a railroad map, intersecting tracks where robbers are attempting to flee, and two officers for you to control. Using the subway tracks, you must carefully position your cops to cut off the escaping criminals; working in sync to block off stations and intercept robbers is your task, and in figuring when and where to make your moves lies the increasingly tricky strategy of City Cops‘ puzzles. As you progress, special power-ups expand yo…
Dissembler offers a colorful twist on the matching puzzler, available on iOS
Ian MacLarty’s past games like Boson X and Black Hole Joyrider have all taken uniquely different angles on the runner genre, whether it’s the former‘s rotating gauntlets or Joyrider’s limited-fuel races. His newest iOS title, Dissembler, shifts from hectic arcade action to colorful minimalist puzzles, but maintains the trend of taking a different approach with its genre. At its core, Dissembler is a matching puzzler, challenging you to shift tiles and match colors. But rather than new tiles appearing or the goal of a high score, Dissembler presens you with over a hundred single-screen collages and asks you to break down the design tile-by-tile, until none remain. T…
Returner 77 concludes its sci-fi puzzle adventure with the release of the Den chapter
More than a few games have followed in the footsteps of The Room, exploring tactile hands-on puzzle solving through different themes. Games like House of Da Vinci have gone for a familiar Victorian style, but Returner 77 designed its rooms and puzzles with science fiction flair. Now the game’s final chapter, titled The Den, is available on iOS, added in a recent update. Returner 77 tasks you with exploring an attacking alien force’s crystal ship, in the hopes of finding a way to save Earth. Within its odd corridors and otherworldly rooms rest machinery and extraterrestrial contrapations to interact with, letting you progress deeper into the vessel and through the game’s…
Death Squared doubles the tricky challenges in this color-based iOS puzzler
The block-pushing Sokoban-style puzzler has seen myriad variations and permutations on mobile, but while others may be more complex or minimalist, few can claim to as clever and mischevously designed as the newly-ported-to-iOS Death Squared. At its core, you think you might know how Death Squared works: manuever blocks around tight levels filled with gaps and barriers and corners, pushing those blocks into the right spots. And you would be right; Death Squared does want you to solve its 80 main levels like that, enhanced with color-based twist where red and blue objects and traps interact with the like-colored blocks. Death Squared works like that, until you realize moving a block makes…
Hidden Gem of the Week: Euclidea
Math-based puzzlers tend to revolve around computation and sums, but Euclidea isn't like most games in that niche; rather than numbers, geometry is the focus, constructing figures and shapes with minimalist tools and within a minimalist aesthetic. Euclidea starts out simple, easing you into its collection of geometric brainteasers by teaching how to create line segments, select points, draw circles. And then gradually, the challenge begins to increase, as you use intersecting circles to create equilateral triangles and perfectly bisect lines. But the game isn't completely merciless. As you master the simpler tasks like deducing parallet lines, Euclidea provides tools that automatica…
Hidden Gem of the Week: RYB
This is the first in a weekly series of features dedicated to highlighting interesting, lesser known hidden gems across iOS and Android. With the sheer volume and rate of new releases, it can be easy for a game to unnoticed, unseen; some here may be newer or older, but all are engaging in their own unique way. Picross, Paint It Back, Minesweeper, Hexcells. There’s something uniquely satisfying about a logic puzzler, perhaps how one can solve their challenges without guessing or mistakes, through pure deduction. RYB falls squarely in this category, a Picross-style puzzle game that eschews numbers and grids for colors and geometric shapes. Squares, triangle, hexagons, and other sha…
Wayout is a clever minimalist puzzler heading to iOS and Android on January 25th
A minimalist puzzler offers a unique kind of satisfication - not too complex as to be overwhelming, while being simple and distilled without being too easy - and Wayout looks like it'll be a promising addition to that category when it releases on the 25th. Befitting its subgenre, Wayout's premise is a simple one: every stage presents you with a grid of white and different colored tiles, your job is to make the entire grid devoid of color. Tapping a tile affects the color of surrounding tiles in various ways depending on color and marking; some change colors in specific patterns, or only activiate specific tiles, or change certain colors. It's through blending togethers this array of mecha…
Puzzle and adventure awaits with Tiles &Tales, available on iOS and Android
Recently launched by its publisher European Games Group, Tiles &Tales is a free2play Fantasy Puzzle Adventure RPG set in a universe where there is no shortage of colourful tasks to complete and puzzle challenges to overcome. With simple screen swipes, taps, and flicks, Tiles & Tales aims to provide an intuitive gameplay loop, letting players gradually level up their hero and compete with friends through unified Facebook connectivity. Once choosing any one of Tiles &Tales’ four central characters, you’ll embark on a journey to match coloured tiles and levelling up your hero, fighting enemy foes in an attempt to free the kingdom of Zanira. Developers Trilith Entert…
You can combine the building blocks of life to create UFOs in elemental puzzler Alchemy Classic
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Hands-on with Melody Monsters, the musical match-3 from SongHi
We saw a bunch of games during Pocket Gamer Connects, and Melody Monsters was certainly one of the cutest. It's a match-3 puzzler to be sure, and definitely more in the Puzzle & Dragons camp than Candy Crush Saga, plus it's got really great presentation and a nice extras thrown in for good measure. Here's the lowdown.…
