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Tag: Puzzle

  • Rakuen Preview
    Upcoming
    • PC
    Rakuen Preview

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    Laura Shigihara is probably best known to gamers as the musician behind "Zombies On Your Lawn," the award-winning (and wickedly infectious) theme song from the mega-hit Plants vs. Zombies. But these days she's hard at work on something of a more personal project: Rakuen, a story-based adventure about a sick little boy living in a hospital. Every day his mother reads to him from his favorite book, about a child in a far-away world who embarks upon a great adventure to be reunited with his tribe. Tired of his hospital life, he asks his mother to take him on the same quest, and so they set off together to discover the Forest Guardian of the story, an adventure that will lead them to learn more about the other patients in the hospital and the secrets and struggles that tie them to it."Rakuen's story actually grew out of a song that I wrote called 'Jump,'" Shigihara recently explained. "I wrote it a few years back but didn't end up arranging/producing it until I was asked to submit a track for the Play for Japan album Akira Yamaoka organized after the Tohoku earthquake. When I wrote the song, I thought about two things: I thought about how in life, we often have to go forward and hope for the best, even though we don't know how things will turn out; we don't know if we'll fly or fall. Sometimes we can't do anything at all but hope for the best, and jump. I also thought about how we all have a child inside of us that just wants to be told that everything is going to be alright. Sometimes when your Mom says, 'Don't worry, everything's gonna be alright,' she can't explain how or why it will be, but just hearing it makes you feel better. That's what this song is about. "That's kind of what Rakuen is about, too. I imagined a little boy living in the hospital, coming to terms with his problems by helping others," she continued. "Perhaps others who are too old to have a Mom, or who are carrying too much on their shoulders to ask someone to be there for them. The boy's Mom gives him the gift of hope, and through his adventures, he's able to pass that on to those around him. Through his actions, he's able to tell them, 'Everything's gonna be alright,' so that they don't have to be afraid to jump."
  • Fright Heights Walkthrough
    Walkthroughs
    • iOS
    Fright Heights Walkthrough

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    Fright Heights is a puzzle game created by Chillingo. You clear a haunted tower of nosy humans by managing ghosts according to their numerical values. Gamezebo's quick start strategy guide will provide you with detailed images, tips, information, and hints on how to clear your domicile of those meddling kids."
  • Spirit Stones Review
    Reviews
    • Android
    • iOS
    Spirit Stones Review

    By

    Generally speaking, match-three gamers don't run with role-playing gamers or trading card gamers, but Gamevil, one of South Korea's largest mobile game publishers, plans to alter that. Aiming to make these mismates mingle, Gamevil brings us Spirit Stones, a new three-genre mash-up that bravely blends bits of match-three, bobs of RPG, and driblets of TCG. Although occasionally brought down by repetition and missing sound and interface elements, Spirit Stones basically blows the doors off, thanks to dynamic deck-building and habit-forming combat.In terms of narrative, Spirit Stones falls on the match-three end of the spectrum—meaning, there's not much of one. The context is a fairly predictable good-versus-evil kind of thing, with you being tasked with using the power of the Ancient Gods (the Spirit Stones) to save the kingdom of Dulaz (a place that really should be re-named "The Kingdom of Busty Women," by the look of its subjects). To attain these powerful stones, you must first fight your way through various lands, past all manner of hostile undesirables. Fortunately, you don't have to do it alone: you get to take a party of your bustiest—I mean trustiest, friends with you."All joking aside, it's hard not to notice the 'amplitude' of your warriors since Spirit Stones has enthusiastically embraced an aesthetic that's highly stripperific. Even so, each card displays a great-looking character that's beautifully rendered, and there are an amazing number of them. (Incidentally, characters, 90% of whom are female, are also rendered in battle as weird—and slightly disturbing—baby-faced-but-boobsy bobble-heads.) Credit should definitely be given since a lot of work was put into creating the gorgeous character art, not only for the base cards, but for their enhanced variants.(The game's sound on the other hand, could use some work. Battle result screens seem to be completely lacking music and sound, and the music loop during battle is nothing short of maddening.)
  • Fright Heights Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    Fright Heights Review

    By

    A lot of justifiable complaints are leveled against modern games' obsession with tutorials. Those of us that grew up plugging a cartridge into an NES and then praying for clarity tend to get impatient with hand-holding and long-winded instructions. While brevity is certainly preferable with tutorials, we still need to learn how to maneuver around a title (especially since today's games don't come with printed manuals—remember those?). If we misunderstand a game's mechanics, we might become irritated and put that game down forever.Fright Heights is a rare example of a game in need of a fleshed-out tutorial. It's an initially befuddling puzzle title that provides some cute and creative brain-bending once you get the hang of it - but the learning process is totally on you. Frustration, not ghosts, is what might wind up driving you away from these haunted halls. Look up online tutorials if necessary, and persevere. It's worth it.Fright Heights takes place across several run-down towers that are populated by various ghouls and ghosties. Humans have begun snooping around the area, because our species lacks the survival instinct that helps smarter animals pay attention to big fat "KEEP OUT!!!" signs. It is your duty to set up ghosts and scare away the warm-bloods.Fright Heights is a little bit Sudoku and a little bit Tetris. The right side of the screen is occupied by the multi-level tower, which is essentially your game board. On the left side, there's a line-up of people and ghouls. Each monster is surrounded by different numbers that indicate its scare factor. The location of the numbers technically give the monsters a shape: some have a value above and below, some have values on all side, and so on. 
  • Rabbids Big Bang Review
    Reviews
    • Android
    • iOS
    Rabbids Big Bang Review

    By

    The wall-eyed, buck-toothed Rabbids have had us doing silly things for years, and now these loony lapins have us hurling them through space. In Rabbids Big Bang, we take part in the Rabbids' very own space program (which consists mainly of trying to collect floating coins and bouncing off planets) and learn to use their proprietary methods for intergalactic travel. Although fun at first, in mastering the game's surprisingly challenging physics-based proceedings, too many similar missions make for quickly-developing monotony.As we all know, the Rabbids are doers, not thinkers. In Rabbids Big Bang, what they're doing is seeing how much adrenaline they can get out of flying around the Universe, powered by nothing more than a strapped-on soda bottle. There's no story to Big Bang, so don't look for one. You simply begin with two Rabbids standing on the surface of a planet, one wearing a jetpack and one holding a baseball bat. Around the planet float other planets, fuel bubbles, gold coins, UFOs, cows, and other weird and inappropriate things, and your goal is to land on, collect, or run into each of these.At the start of every mission, you tap and hold on a round aiming reticule that determines your jet-pack Rabbid's trajectory. Once you let this go, the Rabbid with the bat slugs the Rabbid with the jet-pack, sending him shooting into space. Tap-holding again activates the jet-pack, as long as there's fuel to be had in the on-screen fuel gauge, and allows the jet-pack Rabbid to keep traveling in whatever direction his head's pointing. It sounds simple, but it's extremely unwieldy at first. In fact, many players are likely to spend the first half hour watching in horror (or laughing diabolically) as their jet-pack Rabbid repeatedly slams head-first into its home planet.
  • Mimpi Review
    Reviews
    • Android
    • iOS
    Mimpi Review

    By

    Mimpi is a gorgeous and whimsical platform-adventure with touchscreen controls about a little white dog who discovers one morning that his master has gone missing. So like any good dog, he decides to venture out past his peaceful home and scour the dangerous lands of the earth to find out just where his master went off to.The story and presentation are some of the biggest strengths here in Mimpi, as everything gets told completely without dialogue, and actually gives you a deeper sense of engagement in both the characters and the narrative than most text-heavy games do these days. The graphics are wonderfully bright, with an almost paper-like quality to them at times, and Mimpi's animations are especially fluid and adorable as he hops and platforms along hills, logs, sleepy fish heads, and everything else you can think of in between!But the big twist here is that a lot of objects in the game environment can actually be moved and manipulated by the touch of your finger: something you'll be needing to do a lot of if you want to traverse most of the game's trickier platforming sections and puzzle scenes (not to mention the odd and rather out-of-place hidden object scenes you'll be asked to complete at the end of each larger level).The visuals and world design are the true shining stars here in Mimpi, as everything feels like one enormous and interconnected sidescrolling stage, that takes you through all sorts of different environments from hillsides and forests, to beaches and underwater caves (Mimpi gets to ride around in a giant air bubble during these sections). It's true that you'll never see the same location twice in the game, and the optional bone collectables provide an extra splash of challenge, which unlock cute comic strip stories in the gallery; in addition to the rarer light bulb collectables, which give you an extra hint when you need some help on how to proceed.
  • har•mo•ny Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    har•mo•ny Review

    By

    With two apps under its belt - puzzle game Blendamaze and weather forecasting app Foresee - developer borderleap is still relatively new on the mobile app scene. Even so, it's established a distinct aesthetic that's carried forth in its third release, harmony: a sleek, colorful puzzle game. harmony's main boast is that it contains over a thousand levels; unfortunately, too many of those feel like  padding.Like other borderleap apps, harmony employs a clean, minimalist approach to graphics. Each level consists of nothing more than bands of color that call to mind the Pantone paint swatches used by graphic designers. When the game starts, you're confronted with several slightly jumbled color bands and are given a simple, three-step tutorial. The gameplay concept is simple: each colored block contains one or more dots indicating how many moves it can make. Blocks can be swapped (within a certain range) by tapping first one and then the other. In order to solve the puzzle, not only must all the colored blocks be placed correctly, but every one of their collective moves must be used."The game is a lesson in streamlining, and its interface contains only the four simple button icons needed to restart a level, undo a move, skip a level, or preview what the finished puzzle should look like. As simple looking as each level is, the color combinations and trippy electronic soundtrack make harmony into aBejeweled-like form of stress reduction. Levels start out extremely simple, with only three or four bands of color divided into twelve or sixteen blocks respectively, and the puzzle aspect at that point is gentle and, in general, based on making a correct first move.
  • Catch The Berry Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    Catch The Berry Review

    By

    Oh hello there, it's berry nice to meet you! And now that my one awful attempt at being funny is done with and out of the way, I can tell you about a brand new physics-based puzzle game that comes to us straight from the berry-filled mountaintops of Random House Digital: in what is the very first mobile game by the big-name publishing house. Borrowing ideas from both Cut the Rope and Where's My Water?, Catch the Berry is an amalgam of several successful physics-based puzzler ideas that we've seen before in the past. But does their new arrangement here give you that sweet taste of satisfaction that mobile gamers crave, or does it just leave you with a big ol' red berry stain on the front of your shirt?The setup to Catch the Berry is simple, and told through a handful of nicely illustrated title cards before getting right down to the actual gameplay. The Telfnords are little blue elf-like creatures who like harvesting berries on the top of their mountain community. But then one day while out picking berries, a Telfnord named Huckle discovers a magical artifact that makes all of the berries come to life! The story essentially ends there, and the Telfnords simply just go back to picking more berries like they always have before: only now the berries have eyes, mouths, and personalities, which actually makes things a little disturbing if the Telfnords are still planning on eating all of the living berries that they harvest in the game. Whatever, we just won't think about that."At its core, Catch the Berry is probably the most comparable to ZeptoLab's Cut the Rope, in that each of the game's initial 80 levels requires players to guide a happy berry into a basket held by Huckle, while collecting three optional diamonds along the way. But of course, berry picking isn't always that easy, and as such, the game will constantly be throwing in some exciting new twists to the main gameplay mechanics: like fans that give your berry an extra boost of speed, timed switches that open up barriers in certain parts of the level, air bubbles that allow your berry to slowly float to the top of the screen, and many more. A lot of these are lifted straight from the Cut the Rope franchise, but they still function in a few interesting ways in this specific context.