Spirits $4.99
Spirits for iPad is like a modern day Lemmings, but with the grace, style and cerebral music of modern independent titles like LIMBO and Braid. It’s beautiful relaxing, deceptively simple, and sometimes, unfortunately, a bit boring.
Spirits are small white mushroom shaped creatures who look a lot like the Kodamas from the movie Princess Mononoke. It’s likely that this is an intentional visual relation, as both seem to reside in a similar sort of world.
The player does not control the Spirits directly. They have their own movement motivation, and it amounts to walking forward, regardless of the impending doom. It’s up to the player to create paths of safety by sacrificing the Spirits in order to create tunnels, bridges, wind channels and blocks against the wind channels.
Levels are played out with groups of Spirits resurrecting from fallen leaves. Once they are awake they walk forward. To sacrifice a Spirit, all the player needs to do is poke them, and a menu of choices appears. From there, you can choose what to create, and the Spirits following behind will respond accordingly.
Along with directing the Spirits towards their goal, each level also contains seeds to be collected by the Spirits in order to add towards a high score. The number of Spirits required to simply complete a level is often a small number, but in order to perfect a level, the fatality and sacrifice level of your Spirits must be low, and you have to collect all the seeds.
You can zoom in out of the levels, and explore easily by swiping across the screen, but the actual level interaction amounts to only what you can do with sacrificed Spirits. This means that Spirits is an incredibly passive experience. Convoluted paths with be assembled to get the Spirits to the end goal, but with so many of the creatures needing saving, the game often amounts to the player simply watching his path play out. There is no way to speed up the pace of the ponderous Spirits, but you can immediately skip to the next level once you have reached the minimum number of required rescues.
The puzzles start out simple, as any good puzzle game should, but the difficulty ramps up rather quickly. There are about 40 levels to complete, and you might just be jumping on Google for hints before even hitting the halfway mark. The game can be difficult, but it is a welcome challenge.
The main selling point of Spirits are the beautiful visuals, and ambient music. The only drawback to the visuals, are that they are fairly consistent throughout. The game sticks to a fairly consistent color palette throughout the whole game, and none of the levels do anything specific to separate themselves from the others. The core art style of the game is so pleasant though, that it isn’t much of a complaint.
Cardboard Castle $0.99
The title Cardboard Castle is partially deceptive. There is a lot of cardboard everywhere, but castles are only barely referenced. Cardboard Knight would have been slightly more appropriate, but what’s in a title? Or a better question, why did I even take the discuss it in such depth.
In Cardboard Castle, you are a Knight in a world made of cardboard as you roam the stiffened paper land in search of the opportunity to do the sort of tasks that knights tend to do. Save princess, defeat monsters, and of course, turn cardboard into wet clumps of paper mache. These are all commonly referenced Knight activities.
The game itself plays like a point and click adventure game, except without all the item collection, and exploration. Each level is contained on one screen, and the Knight must make his way from the left side to the right side, by solving puzzles in a specific order.And order is the key. If puzzles and switches are not activated in the right order, then the game starts over.
The game’s art style is reminiscent of LittleBigPlanet in the idea that all of the elements of the worlds and characters are made up craft materials. Everything is made of cardboard, and some things will react like cardboard really world. The cardboard motif is utilized a great deal in the art design, but is inconsistent when it comes to puzzle solving. Scissors will break apart enemies and buildings, but so will cardboard axes left behind by enemies. Water will break apart most items into the paper mache that can be dried to be used as bridges, but watering cardboard trees produces cardboard apples. The inconsistencies lead to solutions that are not always immediately apparent, but that is the nature of the point-and-click genre, so it’s hard to fault the game for that.
You can use discovered coins hidden throughout the levels to unlock hints, but their purchase won’t guarantee your success.
The game has a n underlying narrative that is told through opening and closing sequences between groups of levels. It’s humorous, and even plays with your expectations a little bit with the resolution of the opening conflict. The scenes are funny, and worth reading.
The game is relatively short, but without the aid of a walkthrough, which is the best way to play the game, the later levels will keep you stuck for a long time. There is also a timed mode that tasks the player with solving short little randomized puzzles as quickly as possible, which extends the gameplay quite a bit, especially since you can do high score battle in this mode.
There are a few trophies to be unlocked, but they have no connection to either the iOS game center, or any of the other achievement services that have been established. It’s fun to unlcock them, but they don’t hold much wait aside form personal accomplishment. Hopefully a future update will retroactively add these achievements to Game Center.
Cardboard Castle has a great style, and for a dollar, you can’t go wrong, especially if you are looking for a creative point-and-click style game for the iPhone. These are the kinds of games that work perfectly on the touch screen device.
