With so many games coming out on the App Store each and every day, it feels like pretty much every genre has gotten oversaturated. Puzzle games have been a natural fit for on-the-go play for decades now, and that’s probably the largest genre on iOS too. But there’s a subset of that genre known as minimalist puzzle games that has also become quite crowded, but is still consistently providing some great new experiences. These puzzlers look to strip away all the flash and focus on straight up mechanics. Unbalance is a new minimalistic puzzler from Turkish developer Tvee Games where the goal is incredibly simple: Get the red dot that’s living inside a variety of shapes to fall down to the goal below. The way you do that is what’s interesting to me. You’ll add your own dots into the different compartments of the shape to throw off its balance and hopefully get that red dot to worm its way through the maze inside and eventually out into the goal.
This would probably be a fun game even if all you did was rotate the shape to free the red ball, not unlike some little plastic puzzle toys I used to play with as a kid, but by using weight and gravity it takes it to a whole new level. Throw in the red and blue weights which can eliminate like-colored lines from within the shape and I’m sure there will be some serious brain-busters mixed into the 96 levels in Unbalance. Even more impressive is that the game is entirely the work of one person, from the programming to the design and even the art and ambient sounds. Unbalance is set to launch next Thursday, August 17th as a 99¢ premium app so keep an eye out for it!
