The App Store is such a massive place that it’s pretty common for games to fly under the radar, even when they’re the type of games that seem like they shouldn’t have. Swedish developer Wadonk’s Captain Cowboy (Free) is one of those games that I’d have figured our forum members would have been all over when it released back in December. It’s a very old-school inspired puzzle adventure with a heavy Boulderdash influence, as you’re exploring and digging your way through a huge world collecting diamonds but you’ll have to be strategic about how you dig around so you don’t end up in a situation where a boulder will crash down and squish you. There’s also plenty of puzzle elements where you’ll have to use the boulders to pass various traps and weapons. Overall it’s a quirky little game with not a lot of hand-holding and plenty of little details to discover on your own, just like the old days. It even has faux scanlines. Like I said, this is the type of stuff our community is usually all over! Such is the nature of the App Store.

Anyway, the lovely developers of Captain Cowboy sent us an email yesterday alerting us to the existence of their game. A few weeks late, but no big deal. I checked the game on the App Store and just based on the screens thought it looked cool, so I made a thread for it in our forums. I figured I’d see how our community took to it. They also sent along a trailer for Captain Cowboy which I embedded in the forum thread, but YouTube was giving me issues yesterday so I didn’t actually watch the trailer myself. This was a huge mistake. The trailer is simply amazing. I don’t want to say anymore about it, just watch, and make sure you’re somewhere where you can listen to the sound.

So as it turned out, the nice retro-style screenshots and the hilarious trailer caused Captain Cowboy to garner quite a buzz on our forums since yesterday. It also doesn’t hurt that the game itself is really pretty cool. I love how you really have to strategize your moves, and how if you’re not careful you can totally screw yourself over by getting smashed with a boulder or trapping yourself in a corner. It’s not the kind of game that’s going to be for everybody, but Captain Cowboy does what it sets out to do extremely well, especially for the first release from a very tiny developer in the Swedish forest.

The developers have found the game’s thread in our forums and have stated that iPad support is already in a version 1.2 update that’s awaiting approval from Apple. It may be a few weeks after its release, but Captain Cowboy is a cool game that is worth checking out, and since that’s sort of what we try to do around here at TouchArcade–tell you about the cool games–I wanted to let you all know.