Manifold garden is out, along with:
Ballistic baseball
Things that go bump
Pac-man party royale
Manifold Garden looks like it could be awesome. It feels like the love child of Zero Age and Antechamber.
I’m bummed to realize zero age is gone from the app store
I finished Grindstone! Weirdly, I think the levels in the 80s through early 100s were the most difficult. And the boss on level 90 in particular was the hardest in the game by a good margin.
In the last third of the game I got by with mostly just the standard equipment and didn’t have to spend many resources for consumable gear at all. There would occasionally be levels I had to use fancier arrows for and I would watch my total gem count drop by maybe 50-100 over the course of a few levels, but I ultimately finished the game with 2700+ gems, so it was never truly an issue.
Likewise, you don’t need to get all the crowns. I got them all and finished with an extra 31 of those.
Other than the difficulty curve getting weird in that last third of the game, I don’t have any real complaints. And the rest of it is excellent. The animation is delightful, and combined with the sound design it’s incredibly satisfying to tear through a chain of creeps every single time.
The soundtrack is great too, and available on the usual streaming services.
All in all it’s the standout hit of Apple Arcade so far, despite my fears above when I feared it was just going to ramp up frustration.
How many levels are there total?
150 total.
Today’s new titles:
Fallen Knight
Hogwash
Tales of Memo
Yaga: the roleplaying folktale
Lifelike: chapter one
It seems games (even if we cull it down to only the ones I want to play) are being released faster than I can play them. I’m expecting there to be a lull in a few months, but this is kinda crazy right now.
Still trying to 100% Shinsekai right now, which is slowing down me playing other games at the moment.
Yeah, the list of games is impressive, but might actually be too big, too fast?
I paid $5 for Bad North, which is lovely and I’m glad to support the port, but it felt gratuitous with Arcade around. If there were 1-2 more good mobile RTS games in Arcade I probably wouldn’t have. That feeling is a sign the market for paid games is going to change.
I enjoyed Bad North on PC, how is it with touch controls?
A wash. Rotating the island and moving units felt very natural. The small screen made some squares difficult to use that were probably more viable on PC (e.g. ones hidden behind boulders on two sides.) And I’m finding item use difficult to the point where I’m putting all my gold into class updates. Presumably that’s a keyboard shortcut or button hit on other platforms.
I just played Jenny LeClue - Detectivu, which was a well done adventure game, with controls well suited to touch screens. I don’t know how long it’s been out, but it was another quality game on Apple Arcade.
It was there at launch, I think.
Only one new game last Friday, and nothing new today. So I guess weekly updates aren’t a guarantee.
I think I’m two weeks behind, but I liked both Guildlings and Discolored. I have now started paying for a month of the Apple Arcade, but it feels like my interest is dying down. I was hoping for something good after last weeks solitary game didn’t interest me all that much.
I didn’t know about Dread Nautical, but the description here seems to be right up my alley.
One of the latest Arcade games is LEGO’s Builder’s Journey.
It’s got a lot going for it, from what I’ve played. Each level is a beautiful little diorama. And the building interface, while not free from finickiness, is rather nice. It seems akin to Monument Valley, but at the same time, it lets you solve its puzzles multiple ways–even sometimes, as far as I can tell, not having an explicit solution other than to use all the bricks at your disposal. Which is both neat and frustrating, since it doesn’t tell you that’s the case. When it asks you to do some time-sensitive brick manipulation, it gets super irritating, so I could do without those bits. But overall… I… think I like it?
You had me until that.
I let my sub slide since I wasn’t using it much, but now that you can subscribe for a year at a time with a slight discount I will probably jump back in next month.
Anyone hear how it’s doing financially? I haven’t seen anything about it other than people do seem to like it.
I just saw this this morning.
It sure looks like LEGOs.
No “S”! ;-)
I like Apple Arcade although i can’t even really get the full value out of it even at $5 a month.