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…
Incredible Mandy
Incredible Mandy ($2.99) from Dotoyou Games launched on Steam in November of 2018, and about a year later made its way to the Nintendo Switch. Now this week it has arrived on iOS, and this is yet another case of me never even hearing about the game before until it arrived on mobile. In some ways that’s a good thing because I’ve been very VERY pleasantly surprised with Incredible Mandy so far, and even given my short amount of time with the game it’s obvious that games with this kind of depth don’t make their way to mobile very often.
This is a puzzle platformer where you explore large open-ish worlds, but ones that are made up of floating chunks, almost like levels from Super Mario 3D Land or something. The puzzles are environmental and revolve around your abilities to create and use energy swords. The swords can be used for attacking too, but they also can trigger switches in the game which allow you to move certain platforms or open various types of gates and continue moving forward. I definitely get a very heavy vibe of the Shrine levels from Breath of the Wild in Incredible Mandy, both aesthetically and how the puzzles are designed.
The coolest part is that you can generate as many swords as you your mana bar will allow, and even place them into the ground or other objects. The swords have sort of a connection distance you can work within to place a series of swords that will create a daisy chain of explosions. It’s pretty hard to explain, but this mechanic can be used in order to, say, trigger multiple gates at once by placing a sword near once switch and then creating a line of swords to the other, and then setting them off like a string of firecrackers.
There’s much more to it than that, but your sword abilities are pretty central to everything else in Incredible Mandy. I also should emphasize that I’ve played well over an hour now, and somehow I’m still on the first level. There’s definitely even more to come in the game as evidenced by the trailer, and all indications are that this game is HUGE. I should also stress that this is a virtual button-heavy game, and things can feel a little clunky sometimes between some of the 3D platforming and elaborate puzzle solving you need to do. If you’re pretty well versed in virtual controls though, like if you’re comfortable with any of the Grand Theft Auto games on mobile, you should be just fine here.
It’s always shocking to see the quality of games we get on mobile at such criminally low prices. Incredible Mandy has impressed me a lot so far and I’m really excited to see where else the game goes from here, and somehow this can all be yours for just $2.99 as of this writing. If you like the look of the trailer above and don’t mind somewhat complicated games, definitely give this one a shot.
