Hidden Folks, by game developer Adriaan de Jongh and illustrator Sylvain Tegroeg, is a relaxing diversion into beautifully-detailed, hand-drawn worlds. The object of the game is simple: find people, animals, and objects in huge illustrated landscapes. After you’ve found enough items in each area, the next one is unlocked and ready to explore.
The comparison that comes to mind immediately is the Where’s Waldo book series for kids. But there’s a lot more going on here than that suggests, and this is not a game that’s just for children. Hidden Folks comes alive with whimsical animations and over 960 silly mouth-generated sound effects. Each of the fourteen hand-drawn, black-and-white scenes is vast and full of minute details that make finding each item challenging.
I love puzzle games and have seen some great ones debut on the App Store recently, but now and then, I want to play something different. This week, different meant Glitchskier, an endless runner-style arcade shooter by Shelly Alon. It has an off-kilter video game glitch aesthetic and challenging gameplay that together, hooked me immediately.
From the get-go, Glitchskier takes you back to early PC hardware. The screen is distorted to look like you’re playing on a curved, low-resolution CRT monitor. If the CRT look is too much for you, it can be turned off in settings. In the background, a dull hum and whir of electronics and fan blades add to the atmosphere. It’s an opinionated design that goes all-in with the retro PC look, which may turn off some people initially, but drew me in as soon as I started playing.
To start Glitchskier, you double tap a Windows-style folder and then glitchskier.exe. The gameplay is reminiscent of spaceship shooter games like Galaga. You maneuver your spaceship by dragging your finger around the screen. At the same time, the environment advances down the screen, endless runner-style. That, and the enemies that descend from the top of the screen, make avoiding your ship’s destruction difficult.
Your guns shoot automatically as long as your finger is on the screen. The more things you destroy, the higher your score climbs. As you move through the landscape, there are also weapons to collect that help you defeat enemies and bosses. Make it far enough, and you begin to unlock different colored themes too.
Part of the novelty of Glitchskier is the environment through which you fly your spaceship. The screen is littered with computer glitch obstacles like random characters that form barriers. The chaotic universe and enemies relentlessly descending on you is disorienting at first, but quickly becomes familiar and comfortable when you figure out what can be blasted to bits and what you need to avoid.
The unforgiving onslaught of enemies keeps you on your toes and requires split-second decisions. The sense of urgency is heightened by a synth soundtrack that fits perfectly with the game’s aesthetic and reminds me a little of the excellent Stranger Things soundtrack. But Glitchskier is more than just an homage to 80s arcade games. Beneath its carefully-crafted design is a fun game that’s easy to learn and extremely hard to master. The combination of the two sucks you into Glitchskier’s crazy world in a thoroughly entertaining way.
One of my first memories of a portable platform game takes place in the summer of 1996 and it involves Super Mario Land 2 for the original Game Boy. I was 8, and until that point, my only console experience had been with a Super Nintendo my parents bought me for Christmas. I could play with it a few hours each week, which didn’t satiate my infinite curiosity for videogames. When I saw Super Mario Land 2 on a friend’s Game Boy, I was taken aback by two distinct aspects: the contagious fun of a platformer (my only SNES game was Stunt Race FX – don’t ask) and its ubiquitous availability – provided you had enough daylight and 4 AA batteries.
Later that year, I convinced my mom to buy me a Game Boy. A couple of years later, I got a Game Boy Color. For the past 20 years, portable consoles and Nintendo’s Mario games have shaped my taste in videogames and defined my moments of quiet downtime. From Super Mario Advance 1 and 3 (both remakes of games I had never played) to New Super Mario Bros and, to an extent, the recent Super Mario Run for iOS, all my favorite 2D platform games agreed on a basic idea: you control a surprisingly athletic plumber who runs and jumps from left to right.
Conversely, Stagehand, the latest creation by Big Bucket (makers of The Incident and Space Age), upends decades of platformer conventions by turning the genre on its head. You don’t maneuver a character with meticulously timed jumps across retro-styled stages filled with floating platforms and spikes; rather, you sloppily modify the stage itself with touch, dragging platforms to accomodate the hero’s run and making sure he doesn’t run headfirst into cliffs, fall into pits, or get eaten by the inexorable advance of the left side of the stage.
Stagehand is an endless runner combined with a dynamic platform game, only you don’t control the character – you facilitate his run by reshaping the stage around him.
When Splitter Critters by Canadian game studio RAC7 caught my eye, I initially wrote it off as a game for young kids. I think it was the paper cut-out art style that made me jump to that conclusion. Digging a little deeper, I realized I was wrong. Splitter Critters is a game that anyone who likes puzzle games will enjoy. What’s more, its gameplay is truly innovative. I should have known better; this is the same team behind Dark Echo, a pioneering game from 2015 based on exploring a strange world through sound.
Shifting the environment to save the aliens.
The object of Splitter Critters is to guide a group of aliens back to their spaceship. The aliens wander back and forth, trapped by the terrain. You need to create a path back to their ship, which is where the clever gameplay mechanics come in. Swiping your finger across the screen tears the environment in two. The world can be split at any angle, which opens up nearly endless possibilities. You can then shift the two pieces to alter the world around the aliens doing things like lowering a cliff on which they are trapped to a lower level where their spaceship sits. There is an element of the classic game Lemmings in Splitter Critters and the way you guide the aliens to a goal, but how you do that is so unique that the utility of the comparison is limited.
As you progress through the levels, new challenges arise. Pits of water, creatures that want to eat your aliens, lasers, and other obstacles need to be avoided. Levels are made even harder by the fact that the number of times you can adjust the background is limited, so you need to be thoughtful about your approach.
Splitter Critters’ artwork makes the creatures and their planets feel like paper cutouts, which fits perfectly with the game mechanics. I also like how the little aliens bleat as they wander around, and enjoyed the atmospheric soundtrack.
What I’ve found the most fun about Splitter Critters, though, is its deceptive simplicity. The puzzles are challenging, and the mechanics add a fresh, new approach. With millions of games on the App Store, many of which are casual puzzle games, that originality is rare, which makes Splitter Critters a must-try for anyone who enjoys this kind of game.
Red’s Kingdom is the complete package. The action-puzzle game is fun, looks fantastic, and is brimming with style and personality. Red’s isn’t breaking new gameplay ground, but it integrates tried and true elements in a way that makes it feel fresh throughout and scales seamlessly from the iPhone to the Apple TV.
Red is a squirrel. One night, the evil king and his henchmen break into Red’s house, steal his supply of nuts, and kidnap his father. Your goal as Red is to collect your nuts and save your father.
The game mechanics are straightforward. Red’s world has a grid-based layout that you view from an isometric perspective. To navigate around each area, you swipe in the direction you want Red to go. Red rolls somersault-style in the direction you swipe until he runs into an object like a rock or tree. It’s a mechanic that turns Red’s environment into the puzzle. You need to find ways to leverage the obstacles in Red’s world to help you collect nuts and other items.
Red’s Kingdom is linear and level-based, but not in the traditional sense. Instead of moving from one self-contained level to the next, you navigate a far-flung map. You only advance to the next section of the map by reaching an exit. It’s an environment that creates the feeling that you are simultaneously completing discrete levels and exploring an open world.
The difficulty of the puzzles advances at a good pace, introducing new challenges as you go. Eventually, you have to contend with obstacles that can lead to your demise like lava pits, and with enemies you must defeat. Along the way, there are also items to collect that add an extra dimension to the game that keeps it interesting and gives you a reason to explore areas again.
Red’s Kingdom scales exceptionally well. I played the game on my iPhone 7 Plus, iPad Pro, and Apple TV and enjoyed it on every platform. That’s rare. Some games that work well on an iPad or TV feel cramped on an iPhone, and some great iPhone games, feel stretched and blown up on an iPad or TV. Red’s Kingdom’s simple controls and bright, cartoony graphics work well on all three platforms. I especially liked playing Red’s on the Apple TV where it has joined a small but growing number of games that succeed on that platform, despite the Apple TV’s constraints as a game system.
Red’s is not without a couple of rough spots. The soundtrack is pleasant, but unremarkable, and feels a little too much like generic background music you might hear when walking around a mall. I also wish Red’s synced game progress among devices, especially given how well it plays on each. The game does have three save slots, which is great if you have a shared device, but I’d like to be able to advance the same game whether I’m at home in front of my TV or on my iPhone.
Notwithstanding those limitations, however, Red’s Kingdom is a clear standout among recent games. The game’s artwork ties the entire package together with a style that imbues Red and the other characters with personalities that take the game beyond the puzzles and makes it feel more like a story. It’s that personality that I expect will appeal to a broad audience and could make Red’s a franchise we see more of in the future.
There are six types of challenges in total, ranging from avoiding a bouncing cat to throwing shuriken at creatures. Though six challenges don’t seem like many, beating one unlocks a more difficult version of that mini-game. In total there are five levels to each mini-game, so there are several opportunities to replay challenges.
The aspect of Ninja Spinki that aids replayability the most is Endless mode. Every time you beat each of the six main challenges, it unlocks the Endless mode for that mini-game. Endless mode is where the addictive, competitive element that made Flappy Bird famous comes in; it’s all about surviving as long as you can to obtain the highest score possible.
The game seems well-polished, and each of the mini-games is plenty of fun, particularly as you reach more challenging levels of each one.
Nice announcements from Gamevice today: the company is rolling out updated MFi controllers across the entire line-up that are lighter, add Lightning charging, and have better analog sticks. Jordan Kahn, writing for 9to5Mac:
Today the company is introducing a new version of the controller specifically designed for iPhone 7 and 7 Plus with a built-in headphone jack and a Lightning port for charging. It also has second-generation controllers launching today and later this month for iPads.
While the new headphone jack and Lightning port for charging are the standout features of the new iPhone 7 and 7 Plus controller, the company notes that it also upgraded the thumb sticks and made the controller lighter by removing the battery and using the iPhone to draw power.
I’ve been using my original Gamevice for the iPhone 6s Plus (which also works with the 7 Plus) to play the majority of console-type games I have on my iPhone (I’m about to start a new playthrough of Final Fantasy VII and I’ve played a few Super Nintendo games with Provenance). I like the device a lot and Lightning charging seems like a convenient addition. I’m going to consider the second-generation version for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro whenever it becomes available in Italy, too.
The Pokémon Company has released another Pokémon game for the iPhone and iPad: Pokémon Duel. First released in Japan, Duel is now available in the US App Store and many other countries. Duel is a strategic board game the object of which is to maneuver your Pokémon to a goal in your opponent’s territory. According to The Pokémon Company:
Selecting the six Pokémon for your team is an important part of Pokémon Duel. Each Pokémon figure has different strengths and a set number of steps it can take, so you’ll have to plan your moves strategically. Send your Pokémon along different routes in a rush to the goal, or block your opponent’s Pokémon from advancing.
When you get next to one of your foe’s Pokémon along your route, you’ll need to engage in battle to advance. Battles are determined by Attacks on each Pokémon’s Data Disk—spin the disk to see which Attack each Pokémon will use.
Pokémon Duel is available on the App Store as a free download. The game includes an in-game shop to purchase items with gems, which are collected by playing the game, but which can also be bought with In-App Purchases.
Yuri is a delightful hand-drawn platformer for iOS and macOS by Fingerlab that follows the adventures of Yuri, a small child who wakes up in a dreamlike world. You may recognize the Fingerlab name from one of its previous iOS releases, DM1 - The Drum Machine, an excellent music app for the iPad that won an Apple Design Award in 2012.
Yuri was conceived of by French brothers Ange and Aurélien Potier. Ange drew Yuri for over ten years as a comic strip and made short films featuring the character before he and three others built a game around Yuri. As a game, Yuri immediately reminded me of Limbo because of its monochromatic, dream-like art. According to Fingerlab, the game is also a tribute to comic adventures like Tintin by Hergé and Little Nemo by Winsor McCay, the influences of which shine through in the plot and artwork.
The whole package is tied together with incredible sound design. Right from the opening screen of the game, the sound of rain against Yuri’s window adds to the atmospherics. That, combined with an exceptional soundtrack that is available separately on iTunes, bring Yuri’s dream world to life.
The game itself is easy to play. Yuri wakes up lying in his bed surrounded by vegetation. On iOS, there are buttons with left and right facing arrows in the bottom left corner of the screen for moving forward and backward. In the lower righthand corner of the screen is a button with an upward-facing arrow for jumping. On the Mac, the left and right arrow keys are used to move forward and backward, and the spacebar makes Yuri jump.
When Yuri first gets up, his bed turns into a sort of scooter, which is how he navigates the strange world that surrounds him. The world is dark like Limbo but rendered in shades of blue that create a less foreboding atmosphere than Limbo. As you explore, there are birds and bugs everywhere, some of which are obstacles that will cause you to die if you run into them too many times. The consequences of dying in Yuri are minimal, though; you just restart close to where you left off, and try again. That makes the game less challenging than some but fits well with the theme of the game. Yuri is more about exploration than defeating enemies.
In all, there are ten levels to play in Yuri, and the developers say more are on the way. That isn’t very many levels, but each is detailed and longer than many games, so the level count is a bit deceiving. Moreover, the length of the game strikes me as reasonable in relationship to its price. The iOS version of Yuri is also available on the Apple TV, where its simple controls make it a delight to play.
Yuri drew me into its mysterious world immediately. It’s the kind of game I love to relax with because it’s as much about experiencing the story as it is a game. If you want to get lost in another world this weekend, Yuri is an excellent choice.
