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…
Cinco Paus
It was an odd week around here with the App Store being frozen for the holidays and only a handful of new games even being released. We even decided not to do our normal Out Now post on Wednesday because, well, it would have had like four games on it. However, one pretty significant game did make its surprise debut on Christmas Day and that game is Cinco Paus ($9.99), the latest game from popular roguelike developer Michael Brough. If you’re familiar with the fanaticism surrounding Brough’s previous games and their enduring designs, you’ll know why Cinco Paus was an easy pick for Game of the Week this week whether it was just a handful of games being released or a hundred. This is another dose of the Michael Brough good stuff.
As our own Shaun Musgrave has already reviewed Cinco Paus in depth, I’ll save going into the details in this feature. All I’ll say is that the immense replay value, layers upon layers of depth, and many hidden elements that slowly unfold the more you play are all hallmarks of Brough’s designs and they’re ever-present in Cinco Paus too. One interesting tidbit is that the game is purposely in Portuguese, because Brough is currently learning the language and wanted to immerse himself in it as much as possible, even while designing games. It also pushed him to think about how to make the gameplay clear to everyone whether they knew the language or not, which I think is really interesting. He goes into more detail about the design process of Cinco Paus in this blog post and it’s a really fascinating read.
So, with this being our final Game of the Week of the year, I feel pretty good we’re sending off 2017 with such a high-quality release from one of the best game developers out there, and I’m looking forward to whatever amazing mobile gaming adventures await us in 2018!
