Layton Brothers Mystery Room is a strange mix, one of Level-5’s trademark cutesy charm and a more brutal world than the team has depicted before, and it doesn’t always feel like a comfortable artistic fit. Rather than bring the charm and whimsy of the Professor Layton series to smartphones and tablets, Level-5 has opted for a noir crime-scene simulator complete with gruesome kills, saxophone solos and heated confrontations with the accused.
Set in Scotland Yard, you take on the role of rookie detective and latest apprentice to one Alfendi Layton, son of the famous Professor. Examining the reconstructed scene of a crime – a timed routine of spinning, zooming and [...]
Knights of Pen and Paper is not a turn-based RPG game, but its a post modern deconstruction of a turn-based RPG. The twist is that you’re not actually controlling a band of brave, noble adventurers – you’re controlling a group of friends sallying forth on a brave and noble Dungeons and Dragons-style pen and paper adventure. More than mere narrative dressing, the joke spills over into the mechanics. You don’t just pick classes at the outset of Pen And Paper: you pick the real life character who’s going to fill each role. Grandma, it turns out, with her screeching, aggro-ing voice, makes for an excellent paladin.
Since you also partially control the DM, you construct [...]
Tengami is a work of craftsmen. Its environments have been cut with premium hobby knives, their layers meticulously assembled into a papery millefeuille, all smooth lines, perfect cuts and meticulous folds. It’s like an artisanal pop-up book for adults, and when you put a finger on its pulsing touch points and slide it across so that a new scene can fold into view, you’ll do so more deliberately than the usual carefree swipe; the apparent delicacy of its constructions inspires you to be cautious, lest its flimsy foundations somehow buckle or tear. Later, you’re invited to examine scenery as it unfurls for clues, but you’ll already be accustomed at pausing mid-swipe, curious as to how [...]
This is the most infectious game app on App Store, Tiny Invaders is about a group of alienated germs that infesting the human body, it is a puzzle base game that is exclusively released in iOS only. As anyone raised on How Your Body Works knows, human innards are mostly tubes and angry white blood cells, and in Tiny Invaders they’re arranged in circuit-like patterns that overlap at many points. You shoot a number of germs (dependent on the level) along these tracks from a central ‘invader’, changing their route at intersections and gathering as many orbs as possible before returning to the launch point to drop them off.
Winning a level requires you [...]
