So far, I've played what I would call the prologue of Wadjet Eye's Gemini Rue [$4.99]: I've experimented with  the game's various mechanics and met the major players of its cyberpunk detective plot. What interests me most so far, though, is how writer and designer Joshua Nuernberger teaches players about the game's world and rules.
I've run into three different ways that he does this: the main character's internal monologue, on-screen text boxes, and a series of clinical testing chambers.
Multiplayer videogames tend to bring out the worst in me. I have a temper. I have cursed at and been cursed at, and I've flown into Achillean rage during Mario Kart 64: "Sing, O Goddess, the rage of Yoshi / after he was blasted by a Blue Shell." During one particularly heated game of NBA Jam, I pushed my competitor off the couch we were sharing and said some quite rude things about former Chicago Bulls small forward Toni Kukoc.
But I've never punched anyone over a game, nor has anyone ever punched me -- until I downloaded Frogmind's Badland [$3.99].
Badland is the debut effort from Frogmind, a Finnish duo who cut their teeth on RedLynx Trials series. It is, like so many App Store games, a one-button physics game: touching the screen causes a troupe of silhouetted gremlins (I always called them "little fatties" in my head) to fly forward and upward; releasing your finger allows them to float to the ground. It's our job to guide the afro-sporting fatties through a perilous swamp rigged with booby traps, buzz saws, pneumatic pistons, and spinning fan blades designed to slice, dice, explode, impale, smush, and otherwise destroy them.
Last month we told you, rather breathlessly, about Wadjet Eye Games' plans to bring Gemini Rue to iPhone and iPad. Depending on how closely you followed the point-and-click adventure scene a few years ago, you may know Gemini Rue as a gritty, futuristic detective story about a spacecop named Azriel Odin and an amnesiac named Delta-Six. We now know that Gemini Rue will hit the App Store on April 11 and cost $4.99, though the game will be discounted to $3.99 for early adopters for the first few weeks.
And those early adopters are going to be important: Gemini Rue is Wadjet Eye's first iOS game, and it will serve as a test case for whether or not the indie dev brings more of its back catalog to iPhone and iPad. "If people buy this, then we could justify porting everything else," Wadjet Eye co-founder Dave Gilbert told Joystiq during PAX East. "If it does badly then there's really no point, because this is our best-selling game on the best-selling platform, so that's the best way to gauge to see if it's worth doing."
Wadjet Eye's "everything else" include point-and-click adventures like Resonance, the long-running Blackwell series, and Wormwood Studios' Primordia, all of which seem delightful in their own way. Primordia in particular is gorgeous, if nothing else -- let's go ahead and find a way to get that on a Retina display.
Anyway, point-and-click adventure games tend to do well on iOS as a rule, critically if not always financially. It's a good match for the platform, and Wadjet Eye have taken steps to make the game make the game as "touch-screen friendly as possible," says Gilbert.
While originally built on the open source Adventure Game Studio engine, the Gemini Rue conversion has taken about eight months and has largely been the work of Wadjet Eye chief technology officer Janet Gilbert. Upgrades and improvements include enlarging and improving the hotspots for selectable items in the game.
Wadjet Eye were kind enough to send over a review code, so look for our thoughts as we get closer to release.
Liberation Maiden [$4.99] began as part of Level-5's Guild01 compilation, a collection of four downloadable Nintendo 3DS games made by some of Japan's quirkiest and most innovative designers, including an RPG from Yasumi Matsuno (Final Fantasy series, Vagrant Story) and an airport-management game from Yoot Saito (SimTower, Seaman). Goichi Suda's contribution is Liberation Maiden, a free-roaming, 3D shooter about a young woman who becomes president of New Japan, jumps in a mech named "Kamui," and throws off the yoke of some faceless oppressor called "the Dominion."
Better known by his nom de guerre, Suda51 is distinguished by his surreal, tongue-in-cheek, ultra-violent third-person action games, but Liberation Maiden isn't his first shoot-'em-up: that honor belongs to Sine Mora, a 2D horizontal shooter in which all the pilots are anthropomorphic bears. Liberation Maiden is more subdued fare than what we usually expect out of Suda, but the relatively standard anime-girl-in-a-mecha-suit motif is handled deftly in cutscenes by Bones, the animation studio most famous for Fullmetal Alchemist.
Development on Team Meat's Mew-Genics is in full swing, so much so that the iOS version of Super Meat Boy was put on indefinite hold to send more manpower toward Team Meat's procedural "cat-lady simulator."  Would-be cat herders can look forward to breeding, training, and cryogenically freezing their feline friends later this year on the iPad, but iPhone users may need to brace themselves for disappointment.
"We're not sure about iPhone yet," Team Meat co-founder and programmer Tommy Refenes told Eurogamer in a recent interview. "It's one of those things where I'm sure it'll run, I'm sure it'll be playable. But how playable?" That's not an outright cancellation, of course, but the small screen size is enough to give Team Meat pause, apparently. "If it's going to be really cramped and you can't grab your cats and move them around and it's clumsy, it doesn't seem worth it to put it on there," Refenes elaborates.
Team Meat's long and complicated relationship with iOS and the App Store is well-documented: from  Refenes' initial disdain for the platform's abundance of shovelware, to lead designer Edmund McMillen's distaste for timer- or energy-based freemium games.
The duo's somewhat reluctant move toward iOS development is a result of a very public falling out with Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade and the explosive growth of the App Store. "An iPad comes out and does a year's worth of console sales in a weekend," Refenes explains. "The people in the market to play games are more apt to grab an iPad or a tablet or a fancy phone because it's more convenient."
McMillen concurs, noting that "I'd say a majority of people who have iPhones have them because they play games on them. That's a very hard reality."
Refenes and McMillen may have softened on the App Store, but they still seem committed to avoiding the monetization schemes they've spoken out against in the past. "We're going to handle [Mew-Genics] in the most respectful way possible when it comes to the user and not make garbage games that abuse people and take their money," says McMillen, echoing Refenes' own views: "We're making a game for a platform. We're not making a manipulative way to guilt people out of money."
For more details on Mew-Genics and Team Meat's thoughts on the future of console and mobile game development, be sure to check out Eurogamer's expansive and thorough interview. Release date and pricing information for Mew-Genics hasn't been announced, but the game should be available on iOS, Steam, and Android later this year.
You know how they say brevity is the soul of wit? Indie publisher Wadjet Eye Games must be witty indeed, then: they sent out a press release yesterday formally announcing iPhone and iPad versions of Gemini Rue, a cyberpunk adventure game designed and written by Joshua Nuernberger.
Wadjet Eye promises that Gemini Rue "has been tweaked for maximum comfort on iOS devices," but point-and-click games are typically well-suited to touch devices in my experience, so no surprise there. A pack of screenshots notwithstanding, that's about all there is to know about the project right now.
Gemini Rue has a fair amount of positive buzz behind it: back in 2010, it won the Independent Games Festival's student showcase, and racked up a tidy collection of awards when it was released in 2011 on PC. As you can see in the trailer below, gritty, futuristic environments and film noir narrative are tied together by Gemini Rue's gorgeous pixel art. Gemini Rue is about the intertwining stories of Azriel Odin, a killer-for-hire-turned-cop, and a man named Delta-Six, who wakes up in a psych ward with no memory of his past life.
Maybe I'm a sucker for cyberpunk and adventure games, but I missed the game's first one and am happy to see an iOS port. Wadjet Eye Games will be showing the game to press at PAX East and the Game Developer's Conference in March, so we can assume that the conversion process is coming along, but a formal release window and pricing haven't been announced yet.
The forest around me was changing, and I couldn't find my way back to my cottage: I was hoping to methodically explore the map, hoping to impose logic onto a shifting, supernatural landscape. It was dark, I was lost, and the Swedish snow was falling interminably -- my heart beat a little faster, I was sweating despite being in bed under a blanket, and I became upset enough to close Year Walk [$3.99]Â and browse Twitter for a while. It got in my head.
Granted, I was playing Simogo's latest horror-puzzle-exploration game in ideal conditions. It was dark, it was raining, I had was wearing headphones. But, Year Walk has an undeniable sense of place. It's a gripping, somber, atmospheric, and elegantly-designed game, and everyone should play it.
There's a great story -- perhaps apocryphal -- about Will Wright designing SimCity to reflect his political beliefs. Specifically, the thinking is that Wright designed the trains and buses in that game to run smoothly and efficiently to reflect his own views about the importance of public transportation. I'm not sure how true that is, but it's a great illustration that the games we play -- and how we play them -- says something about us.
Kairosoft's latest, lightweight city management sim Beastie Bay [Free], for example, let me build my own kind of environmentalist utopia. Sure, I could probably attract more tourists (and therefore more money) by building roads through my island, but I'd rather have the beaches and wooded hills and caves -- and the fish, bears, and mecha-chimpanzees that live in them. I have plenty of food and lumber -- resources you'll need for everything from researching electricity to building nests to upgrading weapons -- and my upkeep costs are low enough that I'm not forced to expand faster than I want to. I appreciate that Beastie Bay is flexible enough to allow me that freedom.
Richard Perrin's Kairo [$4.99], released under his Locked Door Puzzle label, is billed as a minimalist, first-person exploration puzzle game. That's a mouthful, and it's true, but it doesn't begin to describe the game's texture and feel -- it's equal parts serene, melancholy, unnerving, and dreamlike.
The world of Kairo is like a playable, explorable tone poem.
Kairo's minimalism is its defining characteristic: it affects everything in the game, from the puzzle design to  the environments. There's no real narrative frame (or text, really) to speak of, just a few scattered hints that the game takes place in some deserted future-Earth. Abandoned monuments abound, but there are no people, just the puzzles and long-dormant technology they left behind. The game's environments are built out of simple shapes -- cubes, blocks, spheres -- giving the game a futuristic, alien quality.
The abstract environments, lack of narrative, and audio direction all help set the mood for each section. The lack of some over-arching emergency gives players time to relax and explore the nooks and crannies in a peaceful, pixelated garden, but it also keeps us disoriented and confused when Kairo takes a turn for the creepy and macabre. Kairo isn't a horror game per se, but it re-creates the feeling of being alone in an old house -- every scrape, every bump in the dark, every muffled footstep feels overblown and significant. Disembodied voices are terrifying when you know you're literally the only living being on a dead planet.
The game's visual and narrative style is matched by equally sparse controls and puzzle design. On the left side of the screen are virtual buttons that move your first-person avatar forward and backwards, and the the camera is controlled by touching and dragging with the right thumb or index finger. The controls are tight and simple and worked well on my iPad 2, but here's the kicker: there's no dedicated interaction button.
This means that every puzzle in the game is a mix of aural, visual, and spatial cues. With no way to interact or pick up items, entire swathes of traditional puzzles (physics puzzles, inventory management, etc.) are rendered off-limits. Some designers might find that restrictive, but Perrin finds a lot of interesting and graceful ways to work within that context, mostly with the help of audio cues -- a bell-chime for "good," a cymbal crash for "bad" -- and visual symbols. The majority of the puzzles are logic-based, which works well with the control scheme and mood of the game.
Perhaps my favorite puzzle involves walking on a giant track-pad connected to two wall-mounted dials: moving vertically moves one dial, but moving horizontally moves the other. Getting the dials aligned just so -- there are clues on the wall to help you figure out where this is -- will activate the machinery necessary to advance.
Doing away with text-based instructions and relying on atmospheric clues makes Kairo an elegant and understated game, but that elegance isn't always intuitive. Kairo is perhaps over-dependent on players paying close attention to each puzzle's fine details, or on making connections between disparate parts of the world -- even after "solving" a puzzle, you may not notice what affect it had or why it was important. Kairo doesn't always do a good job highlighting the salient features of its design: I was stuck for two days on the game's second hub area before I had an epiphany about how to interact with the game's numerous fragmented monoliths, for example.
It also helps to know that kairo is the Japanese word for "circuit": there are four hub areas, each with a number of puzzle rooms attached. Once each puzzle is solved, the circuit is complete, the hub area is activated, and the player can move on. Given the lack of text or narrative in Kairo, learning the structure can do a lot to keep players focused and oriented.
In any case, any unintuitiveness is largely mitigated by a generous hint system. Kairo isn't about making players feel dumb or setting up arbitrary challenges and goal posts: Perrin is obviously focused on letting the player explore the mysterious world he created, see how it works, and try to make sense of it. There are no penalties for using the hints or experimenting as much as you need to solve each puzzle -- it's more important to see what the world has to offer than it is to be stumped by a designer's funky logic.
I like that Kairo demands attention, demands that you clear out some time, relax, go slowly, and be observant. It's a thoughtful, deliberate, and delicate game. Few players, I would imagine, unlock of all of Kairo's secrets during one play through -- there are a few optional rooms that I haven't been able to wrap my head around, hints or no hints. Even after having beaten Kairo, it's story is still mercurial and vague -- all that exploration provided more questions than it did answers.
Kairo's roots as an indie PC game are apparent, but it's made a great transition to iOS. The controls are responsive and well-suited to touch devices, but more importantly, Kairo brings something fresh and unique to the platform -- there's nothing like it, to the best of my knowledge, on the App Store. We need more games like it.
The judges of the Independent Games Festival have been -- for better or worse -- the de facto kingmakers and secret-keepers of indie games development for over a decade now. Each year, the IGF panel nominates games for excellence in various aspects of game development, including audio, visual arts, design, and narrative. There are also categories for technical excellence, a showcase for student-made games, and the Nuovo Award, which honors "abstract ... and unconventional game development."
iOS games fared well at the 2013 IGF, fielding finalists and honorable mentions in all but the Excellence in Narrative category. Most of these games came out last year and received glowing reviews from TouchArcade, highlighting the breadth and depth of games available on the App Store.
Let's clear the air: clean lines and futuristic stylings aside, Pixelbite Games' Repulze [$2.99] shares little in common with Wipeout. One is an iOS racer that costs less than a dollar, the other is one of Sony's most popular and enduring racing franchises. That's not to discount Repulze, though -- it's from the same team that developed the excellent Reckless Racing 2[$1.99]. Whereas RR2 included drifting mechanics and a dynamic difficulty system, Repulze is comparatively stripped down: it only does one thing, but it does it really well.
The game's most obvious feature is its visual design. The tracks and hovercraft all fit squarely in sci-fi's artistic wheelhouse, but the vibrant colors and sharp lines look nice on a big iPad screen. One of my favorite hovercraft, for example, is the Yugana SB-23, the one that looks most like a podracer from The Phantom Menace. I like the way it handles, of course, but I also like the the way its hydraulics pulse up and down as I bank left and right. Each vehicle is full of small visual touches that set it apart from the rest, and Pixelbite's attention to detail permeates the entire game. Even the menus look nice.
A quick word to developers releasing melodramatic arch-fantasy games on iOS: give your Viking brute a name or I will call him Hodor in my internal monologue.
I mean, I'm sure the hero of Alpha Dog Games' Wraithborne [$2.99] has a thoroughly melodramatic backstory -- having been born of a wratih and all -- but the story (and its voice-acted narration) is camp of the highest order. Hodor's warhammer is an appropriate symbol: blunt.
Hodor's hammer is well served by the Unreal Engine, though, which excels at rendering the chunky, heavy violence you'll find in Wraithborne. The enemy and character design isn't much to write home about, but Wraithborne succeeds in making each strike feel physical better than most 3D action games on iOS. Boulders, cystals, and wooden beams shatter nicely, and Hodor's attack animations are just slow and ponderous enough to make combat engaging without making it slow and unresponsive. Clean lines and clear environments roundout Wraithborne's visuals.
The mechanics at play in Wraithborne is standard for action games: light and heavy attacks, a shield, some special spells activated by a rune-tracing mechanic that stopped being interesting halfway through Phantom Hourglass. The controls aren't good per se, but they impart their own weird internal rhythm once you get used to them.
Hodor can equip three spells at a time -- each with their own mana cost and cooldown -- but his mana pool also governs his shield and can be used to power up his basic attacks. At its best, Wraithborne encourages quick decision making: you could cast a healing spell, or just spam your shields to stay alive; you could summon a powerful but inaccurate fireball, or use that mana to power up a dash attack. These trade-offs are the tried and true tropes of action gaming, but they're evergreen because they work.
Furthermore, Wraithborne suggests some amount of depth: Hodor can be seen unleashing projectiles in our TA Plays video, but I could never quite pull those off; there are still a few runes I haven't quite figured out, though perhaps a few upgrades will prove illuminating. The finer points of Wraithborne's mechanics could use more explanation.
The same can be said about Wraithborne's map. The entire game is played in one contiguous, looping area. This is actually pretty neat, as it cuts down on load times, and finding where and how each section dovetails with the others can be its own reward for exploration. More baffling is how Wraithborne handles, say, player death, or the completion of an objective: the game just dumps Hodor in an ostensibly random part of the map.
This isn't really a bad thing -- the world of Wraithborne is pretty small (too small, in fact, for it's over-the-top lore to really take hold), every area is easy to get to, and you can farm goblins and jewels for spell upgrades along the way -- but it is a weird thing.
One explanation might be to pad Wraithborne's length. It's a relatively short game, even by iOS standards -- I completed it in two sittings, deaths and all. Calm your outrage: this injustice is largely mitigated by a robust arena-battle, Horde-like endgame. The game's combat and spell system come to life as you fight wave after wave of goblin, werewolf, and succubus in an attempt to beat your friends' high scores (mine hovers around 34,000). You'll be rewarded with more jewels to upgrade your spells, and optional bosses will also drop the rare spells you didn't find during the campaign. Wraithborne is short, but it also doesn't have the gumption to charge you another $1.99 for new levels: there are no in-app purchases at all.
Wraithborne is Alpha Dogs' freshman effort, and it's not a bad one: it's well-realized within its own confines and makes good use of its visuals and level design. It's probably a bit short and shallow, but touch-controlled action gaming is really difficult, and Wraithborne stakes its claim valiantly.
As a precocious teenager, I had an irrational fear of the police. Every time I saw them, my hands started sweating as a fetid pit of anxiety grew in my stomach. As a functional member of society today, this fear has largely dissipated -- a speeding ticket is no longer the end of the world as I know it, and I don't tend to keep company with recreational drug users (much).
Still, Adult Swim's Heads Up! Hot Dogs [$0.99] gets to the heart of some people's mistrust and resentment of the police: they're all pig-eyed, hot dog-shooting sociopaths.
In fact, Heads Up!'s seven levels are surprisingly hostile to the urban sausage: they can be dropped, eaten by dogs, blown away by air vents, and even shot by aforementioned crazed police officers.
To reinforce the point: the police officers will shoot at your hot dogs, even if they're already sitting on top of a bystanders' head. It's all very irresponsible, especially since players only get to lose five hot dogs per level.
After a few hours of Oneclick's Angel Salvation [Free], you're likely  to have developed Tetris Syndrome: colored gems, healing crosses, and devilish earth-tyrants will dominate your thoughts. It's turbo-charged high fantasy aesthetic notwithstanding, Angel Salvation begins zen-like, and your eyes may begin to glaze over as your fingers move about the screen, lazily flicking gems around, making matches and raining hellfire on your enemies.
The match-three gameplay drives a larger, Byzantine RPG, but in order to let you familiarize yourself with the differences between a guardian and a hero, between strengthening and evolving, between coins, diamonds, help points, and gems, Angel Salvation starts off pretty slow. You don't have to pay too much attention to the puzzle aspect for the first hour, give or take, and you can content yourself with making little three-gem matches and watching horned succubi explode. I found the experience kind of soothing and hypnotic, like a Tolkien-flavored quaalude.
And then I realized -- with no help from the tutorial I accidentally skipped -- two crucial tweaks on the standard Bejeweled-style format: a turn can end without the player having made a match, and moves aren't limited to adjacent spaces. In Angel Salvation, you can move any gem to any spot on the grid, displacing other gems along the way.
Suddenly, a breezy, lightweight puzzle game turns into a go-like case study on planning and engineering, a high fantasy Rube Goldberg machine. With a little luck and calculus, gems will come cascading down, generating combos, which multiply your damage output. One flick of the wrist can wipe out an entire screen of enemies.
But mechanics don't exist in a vaccuum, and Angel Salvation is balanced and paced just so, and the discovery of the game's finer strategies spring up organically as the game gets harder. Eventually, the game turns brutal, these higher-level tactics become critical, and every turn must be squeezed for combos and multipliers, like blood from a stone.
Eventually, I came to appreciate the overblown fantasy framing it all: the more spikes, fangs, baroque longswords, and glowing eyes something has, the more powerful it tends to be. It's a nice visual shortcut for how Sun-Tzu you'll need to be to survive the encounter.
So, yes, the match-three portion of Angel Salvation is fresh and fun and full of tension, but it also dovetails into a larger, Persona-like RPG that, while perhaps not as innovative, is smart and well-executed.
You'll have access to a stable of monsters and heroes, each associated with an element (hyperbolically called your "Legion" in-game). From these, you'll take five into each battle, and matching the colored gems will do damage based on the corresponding monsters' stats. You can build a balanced team to take advantage of every gem combination or, since quests are color-coded, load up on, say, fire-based monsters before taking on a grass-coded quest.
Completing quests gives you money, diamonds, and more monsters for your roster. Money pays for strengthening and evolution, both of which are done by fusing monsters together. These mechanics are relatively straightforward, but there's a fair amount of flexibility, and they create an effective feedback loop -- finish quests to make stronger monsters, which allow you to finish more quests. There's also a great sense of anticipation and discovery after every battle, hoping to land some rare beast or undead lich.
Diamonds are used to generate more powerful monsters for your retinue, but also to expand your legion past the default 20 or to replenish your mana pool. Each quest has a mana cost, but your mana can be replenished by leveling up, or piecemeal every eight or so minutes. In a game with several different types of in-game currency, diamonds are the most versatile and the rarest which is exactly why they're at the forefront of the game's IAP.
On the surface, Angel Salvation seems pernicious: if you run out of mana, you can't keep playing unless you replenish with diamonds, which can only be obtained by paying real money, or, uh, playing the game you're locked out of. In practice, this has never been an issue for me. Not only is the in-app storefront not working yet, but I've only ever run out of mana after making really bad choices. Quests with higher mana costs are more difficult, and it should be easy to judge whether or not you're boxing out of your weight class.
The mana system also informs some of the larger design choices. Mana is replenished over time, and each quest is relatively short. As a result, Angel Salvation is an ideal game for your morning commute or coffee break: by the time you get back to it, your mana will have naturally replenished itself.
The last piece of Angel Salvation's economy are called "help points," a remarkably clever and pro-social system that allows you to create a friend list and use other players' best creatures as reinforcements in your own campaign. Before each fight, the game generates a set of characters available to you, a mix of your friends' and strangers'. Using reinforcements gives you help points, which can be cashed in for extra monsters for your legion.
Conversely, you'll also receive points when someone else uses your monster, further incentivizing the growth and evolution systems. Upgrading your own team will make them more attractive to the market, which lands you points to buy more fuse-able beasts, which makes your team stronger, etc.
Help points create (yet another) Skinner box, but it's also oddly comforting. When I woke up this morning, I had 800 extra help points, which means that while I was sleeping, 80 different people found my Angel useful enough to bring along. (And seriously, she's great. Her light element and healing ability are both relatively rare.)
Angel Salvation seems needlessly complex on the outset, but none of the mechanics or currencies are particularly deep once you get the hang of them. Each one, however, is well-realized and potent in the larger game, and they all create a sense of constant progression that's attractive without being predatory, each little loop nested in another one. Angel Salvation tweaks match-three-driven RPGs effectively, and it does the same to our established notion of social "energy" mechanics -- it's smart, engaging, and generous.
Season finales are undeniably difficult to pull off: they need to pull the disparate plots of the story together in a way that feels satisfying but not hackneyed, while still maintaining a sense of self-contained narrative. A serialized game like Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space carries the added weight of presenting us with the highest expression of the puzzles and mechanics its introduced thus far.
I've come to realize that the second half of Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space -- say, starting with "Night of the Raving Dead," [$4.99] and continuing through the finale, "What's New Beelzebub?" [$4.99] -- are funnier and generally better than the first two episodes. This is largely because the last three episodes are more tightly connected, with each cliffhanger transitioning smoothly into the next episode. They feel cohesive, and that makes me feel invested.
But it's also because, in contrast to the procedural feel of the first two entries in the series "Ice Station Santa" and "Moai Better Blues," these latter episodes are a perfect fit for the point-and-click adventure genre.
So far, I've played what I would call the prologue of Wadjet Eye's Gemini Rue [$4.99]: I've experimented with  the game's various mechanics and met the major players of its cyberpunk detective plot. What interests me most so far, though, is how writer and designer Joshua Nuernberger teaches players about the game's world and rules.
