The App Store is, as a rule, wild about visually-pleasing puzzle games for the iPhone. iPad-only puzzle games? Not so much. After admitting that sales of Shapist (Free), an iPad-only block-sliding puzzle game, haven’t been as strong as hoped, developer Ori Takemeura announced on our forums that he will be re-releasing the game for iPhone “shortly," complete with new levels and difficulty tweaks. “Work is progressing nicely," he writes later in the thread.

On the one hand, it’s probably a good idea to release Shapist to a bigger audience. On the other, it’s a shame that it’s been languishing on the App Store since it was released a few weeks ago. It’s got a clean aesthetic, introduces new mechanics to jump start the played-out block-sliding genre, and everybody that’s bought it so far in this thread seems to agree that it’s a pretty slick little game. Some blocks are physics-enabled, for example, which allows you to spin and rotate them. Others are spring-loaded on a timer, while yet another variety are magnetized.

There’s a playable in-browser demo here, if you’re interested. I started getting well and truly stuck after five or six demo puzzles, but it’s tantalizing and fun.

Side note: if you’re interested in puzzle game design, Takemeura has posted two behind-the-scenes developer blogs on the entire process. One is over at TIGSource, and the other is right here on our own forums.

Takemeura hasn’t put a release date on the iPhone version of Shapist, but in the meantime, he’s considering a free “lite" demo and continues to update the iPad version.