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Posts tagged with "games"

Game Day: klocki

After last weekend’s fast-paced, stress-inducing racing game, Neon Drive, I wanted to play something a little more laid back and mellow this week. I found the perfect game in klocki, a new iOS puzzle game that launched earlier this week.

klocki is from Maciej Targoni, the maker of Hook, a well-regarded puzzler that came out early last year. The tile-based puzzle game is singularly focused on revealing itself through its puzzle mechanics and designed to be relaxing. There are no tutorials, instructions, or text. You play klocki at your own pace, discovering the rules organically as you play.

The goal of klocki, at least in the early stages, is to complete lines by swapping pairs of tiles. When you complete a puzzle, you only advance to the next one after you tap the screen. You are completely in control of the pace of klocki, which is backed by a soothing soundtrack by Wojciech Wasiak.

As you progress through klocki, things get trickier. The 2D puzzles gain a third dimension, the puzzles become larger, and the mechanics become more complex, making it harder to work out the solutions. No worries though, there are no timers or score. It’s just you against each puzzle.

klocki, which was featured on the App Store this week, is the kind of distraction I look for more often than not in an iOS game. It’s challenging without being frustrating and as easy to pick up for short periods of time as it is for an hour.

klocki is available on the App Store for $0.99.


Game Day: Neon Drive

Neon Drive by Fraoula is a devilishly difficult 80s-themed driving game that immediately reminded me of the campy short film, Kung Fury. The unapologetic, over-the-top style of Neon Drive is a big part of its charm and adds to the fun of the game, which is available for OS X and iOS. The mechanics of Neon Drive are incredibly simple, but the mastering the game requires precise timing. Well-placed checkpoints provide just enough of a sense of progress though, to make Neon Drive more fun than frustrating.

Neon Drive is part endless runner, part rhythm game. The controls are about as basic as they could be – on iOS you steer your car across lanes by tapping the left side of the screen to move left and the right side to move right. On the Mac, you can accomplish the same thing with the left and right arrow keys or other preset key combinations. Each of Neon Drive’s levels is accompanied by an 80s synth soundtrack that adds to the game’s atmosphere as you dodge obstacles. The first time you hit an obstacle, your car is temporarily slowed down with the screeching sound effect of a needle scratching across a record that distorts the soundtrack. Hit a second obstacle and it’s game over. Fortunately, if you cross a checkpoint, you don’t have to restart from the beginning.

Neon Drive features seven very difficult levels. Getting past the first level felt like a major accomplishment even in normal mode. I’m not great at games that require perfect timing, so your mileage may vary, but despite the difficulty, I found Neon Drive fun and addicting in the same way a game like Canabalt is.

Neon Drive's look and soundtrack are a big part of its appeal.

Neon Drive’s look and soundtrack are a big part of its appeal.

I played Neon Drive on my iPhone 6s Plus, iPad Pro 12.9, and 2015 Retina MacBook Pro. The games are virtually identical on iOS and OS X, but I’d give the edge to the iOS version because there’s something about tapping the screen directly that makes Neon Drive a little more immediate and fun. On OS X, Neon Drive got my laptop’s fans roaring almost immediately, which detracts the game some. My one wish for Neon Drive is for Fraoula to bring it to the Apple TV, where I think its simple mechanics would work well with or without a controller.

Despite being frustratingly difficult to master, Neon Drive is a blast to play and does a fantastic job of making you feel like you are playing a real 80s arcade game.

Neon Drive is available for $3.99 on the App Store and $9.99 on the Mac App Store.


Game Day: Perchang

Perchang is a physics-based puzzle game from a new indie development shop that goes by the same name. Perchang describes its game as Lemmings mixed with Marble Madness, which is apt if you’re old enough to remember those games, but that description doesn’t do Perchang justice.

The challenge of Perchang lies in its puzzles, not its controls, which makes it easy to get started, but hard to master. Each of the 60 levels require you to guide tiny balls into a goal using fans, magnets, flippers, portals, and other contraptions. To further complicate things, you’re racing against the clock to get enough of the relentless stream of balls into the goal before time runs out.

The gizmos you use to guide the balls in Perchang are controlled by two on-screen touch points – one red, the other blue. The colors correspond to the items you are controlling on the screen. Touching the colored contraptions on the screen toggles their color, which changes the touch point that controls them. It’s an interesting touch that adds extra depth and strategy to each level by giving you an additional way to approach the puzzles.

The visuals in Perchang are stunning. Each level features beautifully-rendered 3D contraptions. Only the interactive items are colored to correspond to the colors of the controls. The spare use of color is striking and adds atmosphere and personality to Perchang, while also helping players focus on each level’s goal. There are so many variables that affect each puzzle, it’s easy to get lost in the harder ones for long periods of time testing different strategies, which is precisely why Perchang is so much fun.

Perchang is Universal and available on the App Store for $1.99.


Game Day: SEQ

SEQ is a number sequencing puzzle game from 1Button with 280 levels. The premise is simple – each level is a series of squares laid out in a pattern. There are colored squares with numbers in them and grey squares with zeros in them. Your job is to trace a path from the colored squares to the grey squares. Each square along your path is given a number that is one less than the square before it. For example, if you start with a colored square with a ‘5’ in it, you need to fill squares with 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 before landing on a grey zero square. If you have multiple number sequences to complete in a single puzzle, things get trickier. One sequence cannot cross the path of another unless the number in the earlier sequence where the two cross matches what you need to advance the current sequence. It’s easiest to understand by watching 1Button’s video:

SEQ starts with very simple puzzles that gradually get more complex. You cannot skip around, except among the puzzles you have completed or ahead if you have purchased keys to bypass puzzles you cannot solve. SEQ works well on iOS with its simple path tracing and the ability to play for short periods of time. SEQ is also the sort of game that I like to play while I’m listening to a podcast or music, and fortunately the sound effects, which can be disruptive when you are simultaneously listening to something else, can be turned off by swiping to the view to the left of the puzzles.

SEQ is $1.99 on the App Store with a $0.99 in-app purchase to buy five keys that allow you to bypass puzzles you cannot complete.


Game Day: Human Resource Machine

With WWDC just finished, I figured what better game to try than Human Resource Machine, a puzzle game with a development angle that has been available on the Mac and Windows since last Fall, but just debuted on iOS earlier this month. Human Resource starts out simply. You play Human Resource as a nameless worker tasked with moving boxes from an inbox conveyor belt to an outbox conveyor belt. The 41 levels become challenging quickly, but are a lot of fun and cleverly introduce programming concepts in a way that requires no prior knowledge of programming.

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Game Day: Shadowmatic

[Editor’s Note: Game Day is a new weekly series on MacStories highlighting iOS games. Each Saturday, we will feature one classic or up-and-coming game just in time for a little weekend fun.]

Many of the best iOS games don’t fight against iOS device hardware. Instead, they embrace the constraints of the touch interface, focusing on fun games based on simple touch interaction models. Touch lends itself particularly well to puzzle games and one of my favorites is Shadowmatic by Triada Studio Games.

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Alto’s Adventure Adds Zen Mode and Sharable Gameplay Photos

Alto’s Adventure, one of my all-time favorite iOS games, is getting a couple fantastic features today. The first is a zen mode that lets you play as long as you want without having to restart when you crash. If you fall, you can simply pick yourself up and resume from right where you are. There also aren’t any collectables, removing all of the potentially stress-inducing aspects of the game. It’s just you snowboarding down the mountain and doing tricks. The new mode is accompanied by a soothing new soundtrack that fits well with the more relaxed feel of zen mode.

Alto’s Adventure also adds the ability to take snapshots of gameplay. Pausing the game by tapping the pause button in the lower left hand corner of the screen lets you enter photo mode.1 Once paused, you can pinch, zoom, and pan the scene to frame the shot and then take a snapshot that can be shared using the system share sheet.

Zen mode and the new photo feature enhance Alto’s Adventure by making it even easier to soak in the stunning visuals and soundtrack of the game. As much as I like the new features, though, I like that both are neatly tucked away in the interface so neither interferes with the way the original game works.

Version 1.3 of Alto’s Adventure is a free upgrade to existing customers. New customers can purchase Alto’s Adventure for $3.99 on the App Store.


  1. If you don’t see a pause button, don’t worry, it’s there. The button just fades from view over time. ↩︎

Monument Valley’s Second Year

Fascinating look at the second year of Monument Valley – particularly after a cameo on House of Cards and a promotion on the App Store:

Underwood turned out to be a great pitch man, one of several reasons why Monument Valley was actually more successful in its second year of existence, compared to the first. According to developer Ustwo, the game has been downloaded more than 26 million times to date, and more than 23 million of those downloads came in the second year after it released. “We’ve actually had to spend a lot of time maintaining the game,” says Dan Gray, head of studio at Ustwo Games, “and finding new opportunities for people to find out about it.”

For the second year in a row, Ustwo has released a detailed infographic that showcases how well the game performed on various platforms. While year one showed that it was still possible for a premium game to make money on mobile, year two shows just how huge of an audience you can reach by offering your game for free — the biggest reason behind _Monument Valley_’s enduring success wasn’t a fictional US president, it was the lack of a price tag.

The difference in downloads between the first and second year on iOS is remarkable, but even more impressive is the performance in China.

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SketchParty TV 4.0 with New Look, Improved Gameplay

When my family gets together, we like to play games. One game has been a mainstay of our gatherings for the last four years: SketchParty TV.

SketchParty TV is a multiplayer game similar to Pictionary which uses an iOS device as the marker and your Apple TV-connected television as the drawing board. If you have a 2nd or 3rd-gen Apple TV, you can use the iOS version with AirPlay Mirroring. For 4th-gen Apple TV owners, there’s a native Apple TV app that connects to the iOS version.

The 4.0 update to SketchParty TV is a big one, with a visual overhaul for iOS 9+, a redesigned canvas, updated scoring system with speed-based rewards, and full support for the Apple Pencil on iPad Pro devices.

The Team Setup interface was always usable, but it got a lot of special attention in this update. In addition to improved word list settings, entry of team members is easier and now you can drag to reorder and even switch between teams.

If you own a compatible iOS device and a 2nd-gen or higher Apple TV, SketchParty is an excellent game for friends and family gatherings. Right now it’s on sale, too, for $5.99 (normally $9.99). Check it out in the iTunes App Store.