ZoomBook: The Temple of the Sun

Publisher: MumboJumbo

Developer: QB9

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Preview

MumboJumbo's and QB9's ZoomBook: The Temple of the Sun is either an interactive storybook or a jigsaw puzzle with one heck of a plot. We'll leave it up to you to decide when the game launches in June. Either way, the idea is a neat one, and we were pretty intrigued when we got to test drive the game a little early.

In a typical casual game, the player is usually treated to a snippet of dialogue or story and then dives into a puzzle or action sequence, followed by another story interlude, then another action sequence, and so on. (That is, when games decide to bother with a plot at all.) ZoomBook turns this concept on its ear, with story and gameplay that are intricately wound around each other to the point that you couldn't separate them even if you wanted to.

The premise is based on the idea that you're flipping through a kind of journal or scrapbook that tells the story of two archaeologists, John Miles and Linda Stevens. The two discover a strange artifact, which leads them to explore the mysteries of an ancient long-lost South American civilization.

The story is told in comic book-style picture panels with text dialogue underneath. But here's the twist: each new picture panel is scrambled into square pieces of varying size, and in order to move on to the next part of the story, you must fit the pieces back together like a jigsaw puzzle.

There are sometimes sub-puzzles within a larger puzzle that show a new event happening within that particular picture panel - for example, complete the puzzle of a mysterious wrapped package and it will open to reveal a treasure. And thanks to colourful tropical environments and some clever graphical transitions like zooming in and out on parts of the scene, the atmosphere really does feel like being inside a big interactive picture book.

You'll also have opportunities to collect randomly-appearing power-ups in the puzzle portions of the game that can help you in various ways, such as temporarily stopping time, granting extra moves, and giving out hints about what pieces should fit where.

By playing through Story mode, you'll unlock a total of four additional modes. Time mode is basically Story mode with a limit on how long you can take to finish each level. In Puzzle mode, you have a fixed number of moves with which to solve each puzzle, so you can take a slower, more considered approach. In Chaos mode, which is by far the most fiendish, puzzle pieces move around and split into smaller pieces by themselves. The final mode on offer, Gauntlet, gives you the opportunity to play one particular level ad nauseam

With three levels of difficulty, ZoomBook is suitable for a range of abilities and ages. There's also the intriguing hint that more chapters might be added to the adventure at a later time. Could this be Book 1 of a much larger series? The ingredients are certainly there. In the meantime, fans of jigsaw puzzles, games with immersive stories, and bold, bright visuals should check out ZoomBook: The Temple of the Sun when it becomes available for download next month.

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