The idea behind the TouchArcade Game of the Week is that every Friday afternoon we post the one game that came out this week that we think is worth giving a special nod to. Now, before anyone goes over-thinking this, it doesn’t necessarily mean our Game of the Week pick is the highest scoring game in a review, the game with the best graphics, or really any other quantifiable “best" thing. Instead, it’s more just us picking out the single game out of the week’s releases that we think is the most noteworthy, surprising, interesting, or really any other hard to describe quality that makes it worth having if you were just going to pick up one.
These picks might be controversial, and that’s OK. If you disagree with what we’ve chosen, let’s try to use the comments of these articles to have conversations about what game is your game of the week and why.
Without further ado…
Supertype
You know how when you see a game that uses a really unique idea, and you think to yourself “How has nobody thought of this before!?" That’s exactly how I feel about Philipp Stollenmayer aka Kamibox’s latest game Supertype ($1.99). The App Store is inundated with physics puzzlers, and it’s inundated with word games. But Supertype is something a bit different. It’s a physics puzzler that uses words as its objects. It’s terribly hard to explain, but each level has various platforms set up and any number of little squares floating nearby. Towards the top of the screen is a text entry field, and your job is to type letters into that field and then hit done. When you do, the letters drop from the text field and are then at the mercy of the physics engine. The goal is to get those letters to make contact with the floating boxes to complete a level. Ah nuts to this, just watch the trailer!
As you can see, the most interesting thing to me about Supertype is how it uses the letters of the alphabet simply as the shapes that they are, detached from any sort of meaning we have for them as a language. I guess I’ve never really thought about letters in that way before. Beyond that, this is just a really satisfying physics puzzler. There are often multiple ways to beat a level, and more than a few times I’ve done something that ended up working out that I couldn’t replicate in a million years. The game also mixes up what types of puzzles it throws at you, so they’re not always you typing letters on the screen. Sometimes the letters will be typed for you already and your job then is to draw the platforms in a way that makes those preset letters complete the goal. Then sometimes there’s platforms with arrows in them which will blow your letters upwards, and you’ll need to factor that into your solution. I just can’t count how many times I’ve smiled in delight to a solution in Supertype. It’s just a really neat game and should be a no-brainer for a dollar to anyone who loves physics puzzlers.
