Sound designer and now solo game developer Adam Hay has sent over a trailer for his upcoming iOS game Square Rave, and it looks really cool. Being from a sound designer, it’s no surprise that Square Rave is based heavily around music. The idea is that you use your finger to highlight one square on the game grid, and blue squares pop up at random. You want to move your highlighted square over the blue square to “claim" it and increase your score, but you’ll need to do it before the sound bar makes its way across the entire screen. Sort of like the classic Lumines. The big catch is that moving your square around creates a trail that you can’t cross back over, kind of like Snake. Check out the trailer.
I’ve played a bit of a pre-release version of Square Rave and it’s a really clever game. It’s hard as all hell, but clever. There’s a real sense of urgency as you try to make your way to each blue square as that line ticks across the screen, and if you aren’t careful, you can truly screw yourself over by blocking your own path. It can be stressful, but that good kind of stressful. It’s also deceptively deep. There’s the ability to stand on a blue square as the line finishes crossing the screen as a way to stay safe even if there are other unclaimed blue squares on the board. But this will mess with your combo, and thus your score, so you can’t rely on it if you want to compete on the leaderboards. There are also 6 different levels with varying music speeds, meaning Square Rave has quite a bit going for it. My early impression is good, and I think Square Rave will be a hit with the twitch gaming crowd when it arrives on November 26th.
