Review: KAMI for iPhone and iPad

When I originally downloaded KAMI by State of Play Games, I wasn't particularly impressed so I left it aside for the time being. Maybe I'm in more of a zen mood now because I picked it up again and enjoyed it—though more for the presentation than for the puzzles themselves.

The presentation is indeed gorgeous, which isn't surprising if you think that State of Play are the people behind the critically acclaimed Lume. As any origami folder knows, kami means paper in Japanese, and that's the theme of the game.

Nontrivial Games on Paper

The Italian magazine Amico Logico, which should be out today, contains a page of puzzles that I designed.

Amico Logico is probably the best logic puzzle magazine currently available in Italy. Its strength is variety: in 84 pages, it contains about 150 puzzles of more than 40 different kinds, and the editors strive to provide new kinds of puzzles in every issue.

Review: AntiVirus - The super duper accurate hacker simulator for iPhone and iPad

A reader of this blog kindly wrote to let me know of a few good games that I hadn't reviewed yet.
I had seen one of them, AntiVirus (also free) by Kevlanche, among the new releases, but I had skipped it because from the screenshots it looked like a quick two days work.

And it actually is! Because it was an entry in Ludum Dare 27 (it placed #47 out of 2213, so pretty good!). Ludum Dare is a competition where contestants are required to write a game from scratch in 48 hours.

Update: Help Me Fly 1.0.2

Help Me Fly, another of this humble reviewer's top 10 games of 2013, was also recently updated.

The meat of the update is 30 new puzzle (actually 26, since 4 are just instructions), which however have to be unlocked with a $1.99 in-app purchase.

The new puzzles contain four new elements. The first is a beam which powers pieces remotely:

Update: Sky Scramble 1.5

Sky Scramble, one (in this humble reviewer's opinion) of the top 10 games of 2013, was recently updated with major changes.

While the most obvious change is the addition of a title screen (above) and changes to the star graphics so that they are more colorful, the most important change is the order of the levels.

Review: LYNE for iPhone and iPad

As often happens for good puzzle games, one of my first thoughts while playing Lyne by Thomas Bowker was: why hadn't anybody thought of this before?

More precisely, since I've been thinking about path puzzles for several weeks now, my thought was why hadn't I thought of this?