I remember anticipating this game forever, and when it finally released and I laid into it for the first time, after a few minutes of playing I found myself saying “That’s it?" It wasn’t that I thought the game was bad or anything, I just was expecting something more, you know? It wasn’t until I read this excellent piece over at Polygon about Downwell that I was tipped off to some of the finer points behind the game.Īlong with a myriad of little secrets and special features, it was really the combo system in Downwell that really busted the game wide open for me. The crazy thing about Downwell is that it doesn’t seem like much on first blush.
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Kind of a wacky premise, but so are the plots behind some of the most beloved games of all time. Your character accomplishes this by using gun boots – literally boots that fire bullets straight down – to both take out enemies and use as a levitation device while falling. Downwell is an action platformer about a character trying to make it to the bottom of a well while avoiding being killed by numerous types of nasty enemies and hazards. I was very happy to have been proven wrong about that. – – – Downwell is one of those games that had so much buzz prior to its release, I was worried it wouldn’t live up to the hype. For all these reasons it’ll be something that I continue to play daily and will always have a home on my device, and it earns our nod for Game of the Year 2015 There were other great games in 2015, but Land Sliders is a great mobile game through and through, and isn’t the kind of game that could work on a platform other than mobile. Sliding your character around the world of Land Sliders just FEELS right, and developer Prettygreat did a wonderful job of building a whimsical world and cast of characters around that unique mechanic. In fact, the ARG is still going and hasn’t been completely solved yet.
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If you haven’t read the lengthy thread in our forums, but if you like treasure hunts or ARGs, it’s worth the read as the lengths Prettygreat went to to create this global game are pretty astounding.
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Not only have they created a full-fledged high-scoring game with endlessly replayable randomly-generated levels and a wide cast of neat characters to unlock, but they’ve created this is a way that’s easy to add on to, and given the popularity of Land Sliders this seems like the kind of game that can continue living on for years and years with a constant flow of new content.īesides the game itself, developer Prettygreat also created an insane real-life meta game that they incorporated into Land Sliders that has kept our forums on fire for months since the game’s release. That ended up not being the case at all, and besides its unique concept, I think that’s shows the brilliance of Prettygreat. But honestly I had no idea how they would craft a compelling game around it, and figured it would end up as one of those “hmmm, that’s neat!" tech demo type of games and be fun for a few days before being forgotten. It’s not a bad idea to try and capture that feeling and create a game around it, but how exactly does that work? I saw a very early prototype of Land Sliders at GDC this year and thought it was a clever concept and the sliding around the world felt great. Flicking a swipe fast and knowing you can stop the screen from scrolling on a dime if you want. Scrolling around on iOS devices is fun and satisfying. Early iPhone rivals had pretty janky touchscreens which didn’t have the smoothness of an iPhone. It sounds like an incredibly boring concept for a game, but inertial scrolling is something that iOS devices have nailed since the beginning, and I believe it’s one of the things that truly put the iPhone ahead of the pack in the early days of smartphones. What is inertial scrolling? Well, when you’re scrolling through a list on your iOS device, say your list of emails or a list of songs in the Music app, inertial scrolling is the thing that allows you to scroll fast with a quick swipe and the screen will gradually slow down as it runs out of inertia. Land Sliders is a game that’s built around inertial scrolling. In 2015, I don’t think any game accomplished that goal as well as Land Sliders, the first game from Australian developer Prettygreat, did. Those simple actions spawned countless copycats and even entire genres in the mobile space over the years, but it’s rare that a game can come along and create a mobile game that feels truly unique and native to the platform.
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Slicing fruit in Fruit Ninja, drawing lines in Flight Control, even tilting back and forth in Doodle Jump are all great examples of this. – – – It seems like the best mobile games latch onto a simple mechanic that feels natural on a touchscreen device and then builds an entire game around it.