Touch technology has given new life to the puzzler. Phones and tablets afford these games a crisp resolution that puts Mario to shame, great sound through your headphones, and a compactness that means you can solve away anywhere you are. It is this new intimacy of gaming that inspires our list of the top five iOS puzzle games.
Contre Jour — artistic design for the eyeball in everyone
Hot on the heels of Cut the Rope, comes publisher Chillingo’s latest offering — Contre Jour. Put on your headphones and indulge in an interactive experience that is both challenging and a pleasure to play. Directing a little round, uh, eyeball you must navigate through levels ultimately to reach a portal that takes you on to your next adventure, all the while collecting three “lights” to achieve the top scores. However the trick to Contre Jour is that you do not control the eyeball directly, but rather the ground around it. Sliding your finger makes part of the ground rise or fall. All in real time you can get the eyeball some momentum and then slide to boost him up into the air. With later levels throwing in ropes and tentacles, jump pads and other treats for your enjoyment, this multi-touch puzzler is one for the books. With four distinct chapters out at the moment and another on the way, we can expect a lot from this lovely little title.
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Toki Tori — don’t count your freeze guns before you touch
With the most annoying music on this list, comes a very “cutesy” puzzler. Toki Tori is a, well I don’t know what he is, some kind of bird perhaps because he loves eggs – or maybe I’m being prejudiced against the ave species. Indeed that is what Toki Tori is all about — collecting eggs. Tapping at a point on the screen will take Toki Tori there, simple as that. However there are a lot of twists along the way. Little lizardy-dinosaur things really don’t want you to get those eggs, which begs the question, who is the good guy here? For all we know Toki Tori is using those eggs for a diabolical scheme to take over the world… surely not, he’s just too cute.
There is an arsenal of tricks and weapons at your disposal to help him reach all the eggs. With the ability to build bridges, freeze enemies with an ice gun and teleportation to name a few, Toki Tori is actually pretty badass. With a useful zoom function, you must plan your route, because often times one mistake will see you having missed the only way to reach a certain egg. Luckily Toki
Tori can rewind time. Proving he definitely is the most hardcore… well whatever the hell he is.
World of Goo — gooey towers in the sky
World of Goo — the infamous indie. Starting out on PC, how does this tower building game translate onto the portable format? Well pretty darn well. With its signature humour, great art design and a solid soundtrack adding to addictive and tough gameplay, you get one of the most well-rounded puzzle games available on any format. The goal: to save as many goo’s as possible by getting them sucked up by a pipe positioned somewhere on the level. Sounds easy enough, but getting your goos there is hard work.
Using a “grab and drag” element which translates beautifully on touch-technology you must manipulate your goos, water and other elements to construct, deconstruct and manipulate towers or structures that your goo’s travel along until you reach the pipe and save enough goo’s at the end of a level. However the very towers and structures they travel along is built out of goo’s, and so economy is the key to success here.
The game plays better on tablet than on mobile, and some will argue that the PC version is still king. However for pocket gaming fun, World of Goo will give you endless hours, and that’s more than we can ask for.
Shift — a Noir good time
What would appear to be a simple adventure puzzle platformer with some collectible keys is so much more. You play as subject 32763 trapped in an experiment. In stark black and white, you jump around the screen-sized levels collecting keys that flip certain platforms allowing you to get to areas previously unreachable.
Almost like Portal on a miniscule scope, Shift relies on a change of gravity, or rather a change of the world – dramatic enough? At the touch of a button you shift the whole world upside down, into the negative. Now where you used to interact with the white of the world, you now can only jump and move in the black. What solid ground was before is now space to manoeuvre. The joy this brings cannot be described; shifting the world should be a mini-game unto itself. Throw in some spikes, some Pink-Panther sounding music, and you’ve got the most fun Noir puzzle platformer in your pocket — and all this for $1.
iBlast Moki 2 — a blasting good adventure
iBlast Moki was a physics puzzler hit, and with all good hits comes sequels, for better or for worse. And just like every one thousandth sequel in Hollywood, that rare one that is actually better than the original, so iBlast Moki 2 is better than the original. It’s no Terminator 2, but with more variety and fantastic level design, not only is iBlast Moki 2 far better than its predecessor, it is also one of the best games available for iOS.
A straightforward concept is at the heart of the iBlast Moki universe. Your goal is to get your Mokis into a portal by literally blasting them there using bombs. With various items at your disposal to help you get your Mokis to the end point — ropes, balloons, planks, metal rods and other such treats all give the game a great diversity. Add to that bomb timers and some of the best physics on a mobile game and you get the complete experience.
The Mokis are super cute and this game is sure to please kids and adults alike. Although the difficulty level is very high, it makes for a rewarding experience when you succeed. And for those times when you are struggling, iBlast Moki 2’s addition of social leaderboards will come in handy. For the small price of some coins (which you get from completing levels) you can see other people’s solutions to levels, either to help you better your own scores or actually get past that oh-so-difficult level. This social “walkthrough” should only be used at the most dire of times though, if you value enjoyment at all. Arguably the best mobile game around, iBlast Moki 2 deserves to be in everyone’s library.
All games tested on iPhone 3GS (donations are welcome).
What are your favourite iOS and Android games?
