ALTER: Between Two Worlds By: Crescent Moon Games / Fivestones Games Fivestones Games made quite the first impression this week when they released their debut mobile game, a hand-drawn puzzler called ALTER: Between Two Worlds. It has you playing as Ana, a woman with the ability to warp between parallel dimensions that occupy the same space. By pushing cubes around, hitting switches and manipulating lasers, she can prove her mastery over enemies…
High Rise - A Puzzle Cityscape By: Florian Grolig Match-three games are one of my favorite genres to play on my iPhone when I have a few minutes to kill here and there. But I'm not talking about the free-to-play Candy Crush or its myriad of knock-offs. When a match-three game sucks me in and holds my attention, it's because it pushes the genre beyond what we're all used to. Match Six…
Worm Jazz By: Inconspicuous There are so many puzzle games in the App Store that I start and forget about long before completing them. But just a few minutes into Inconspicuous' Worm Jazz, I knew that wouldn't be the case here. Though I got interrupted by other games and didn't get to spend as much time with it as I wanted when it first released, I chipped away at it over the…
A Fold Apart By: Lightning Rod Games Lightning Rod Games' paper-folding puzzler, A Fold Apart, was one of the Apple Arcade games I was most looking forward to. It has you folding photographs of a couple dealing with a long distance relationship, in order to connect broken paths and allow them to get to their destination. The idea of folding paper to solve puzzles isn't brand new, but it's rarely used and…
Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You By: Fellow Traveller / Osmotic Studios Visitors of this site might know by now that I'm a big fan of "found phone" games that ask you to pore through data on a person's device to solve a mystery. They're a nice modern take on the detective genre and, if done right, can make you feel like a super sleuth. Osmotic Studios' and Fellow Traveller's Orwell: Keeping…
Heal: Pocket Edition By: Winterveil Studios There are few things that get me as excited about a game as its art style. I'm a sucker for eye candy and shamefully admit that I've passed on games if their graphics didn't appeal to me. It's on of the reasons I took so long to try the horror game, DISTRAINT, by Jesse Makkonen of Winterveil Studios. But now he's back with Heal, a point-and-click…
Spyder By: Sumo Digital After a number of sporadic releases that didn't really interest me at all, I was starting to wonder if I'd already seen the best that Apple Arcade has to offer. Then, out of the blue, we were surprised last week with a new release from Sumo Digital, called Spyder. For the first time in a long time, I eagerly downloaded an Apple Arcade game and was genuinely excited…
Hidden Through Time By: Crazy Monkey Studios I've mentioned this a number of times in my blog, but I'm not really a fan of hidden object games (HOGs). They mostly feel like a waste of time, like looking for lost keys. I don't like pixel hunting in my adventure games, either. But when Adriaan de Jongh's Hidden Folks released back in 2017, I was completely smitten. It took the idea of Where's…
