Launched in 2012, the tile-matching puzzler quickly became ubiquitous on phones.
More than 10 years later, 200 million people are still playing. Why?
A lot of us were, at one point, in love with our smartphones. In the early days
of Android and iPhone, apps seemed designed to delight; throw a few quid at the
app store in 2010 and you could be playing some cute game, often involving
birds, or messing around with a lightsaber within minutes. Social media apps
designed for phones let us post artfully casual photos in a few taps, for our
friends to drop hearts on. It was fun, once.
But over time, it’s become a toxic relationship. The fun got sucked out of
everything. Social media morphed into a hellscape designed to ensnare and enrage
us, providing just enough of our friends’ posts to prevent us from actually
quitting the platform but prioritising their own ads and algorithmic videos.
Twitter used to be jokes and cat memes and now it’s … well, it’s X, and I know
I’m not the only one who’s deleted it off their phone entirely. The experience
of using apps, phones and the internet more generally has significantly degraded
– and the same can be said for mobile games, most of which now give you about 83
seconds of entertainment before trying to extort you for a £7.99 monthly
subscription or showing you misleading ads that are so fascinatingly terrible
you can’t look away.
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Tag - Puzzle games
PC, PS4/5, Switch; Coal Supper/Panic
In this brilliantly surreal, slapstick cartoon puzzler set in a fictitious
northern town, you (a junior salesman) help an array of weird characters with
odd jobs
It is a classic British comedy setup. An unknown junior salesman at a large firm
is sent on a seemingly mundane trip to an idiosyncratic town – and chaos ensues.
Right from the beginning, this wonderful game from tiny studio Coal Supper makes
it clear it is going to load this premise with as much slapstick and surrealism
as possible. When it’s time to leave the opening sequence, set in a tenth-storey
office, the player is forced to do so via the window, their fall broken by the
very bus they need to catch for their journey.
When you reach the fictitious Northern English town of Barnsworth, a grim
reincarnation of early 1980s Barnsley, you’re supposed to be meeting the mayor
but he’s busy, so out on to the streets you go. Here you discover a menagerie of
weird characters, drawn in queasily bright colours and a deceptively childlike
style, usually greeting you with the words “thank goodness you’re here” before
coralling you to help them with a ridiculous crisis. This might be a portly
gentlemen who has got his arm stuck in a drain, or a chip shop owner whose fryer
is broken, or a senile admiral who needs you to collect his gulls. But wherever
you go – through market places, across rooftops, or down ginnels – you will meet
more oddballs with odd jobs, as the world’s weird logic and spiralling geography
trap you into servile confusion. You wanted to play a cross between a Flann
O’Brien novel and an episode of Dick and Dom in da Bungalow? You’ve got it.
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This cutesy and surprisingly intuitive brain teaser pushes the idea of the
sliding-block puzzle to the very limits
For Jemma, her whole life feels like a puzzle. Left on a stranger’s doorstep as
a baby, she has never felt as if she fitted in, and is desperate to see what the
world looks like outside her small town, which nobody ever leaves. More
pertinently, whenever she moves, the whole world moves along with her – like
sliding tiles, like a series of conveyor belts. It really is a puzzle getting
her from A to B.
Each scene in Arranger: A Role Puzzling Adventure is its own sliding-block
puzzle, where you must think two or three steps ahead to move Jemma and the
objects around her in the right directions. Some things, such as rocks and robot
birds covered in purple static, don’t move alongside her, but everything else
does. So you have to transport swords towards monsters that stand in the way,
keys towards doors, bananas towards shy orangutans. Unless her way is blocked,
when Jemma hits the end of a vertical or horizontal row she rematerialises at
the other end, adding another layer of spatial logic.
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