iOS users know that award winning puzzle game G30 – A Memory Maze is a visual novel, a concert, and a puzzle all in one, and now Android users can find out for themselves. The game is available now in the Play Store, and those who take the plunge will be immediately thrown into its unconventional play style and drawn in by a well-written storyline and immersive music and imagery.
The game is played by tracing dotted lines on the screen to move, change, or rotate pieces of pictures. As you solve bits of the puzzle, the text of the storyline is revealed. The revelation itself is surreal in that the sentences change meaning as more is revealed – the core story of each level is in there somewhere, but you won’t see it clearly until you solve the puzzle. As an aside, the game’s $3.99 asking price has been knocked down to $1.99 in the Play Store for the next week to celebrate the game coming to Android.
Background: The story of the game is at the center of everything, and serves an unorthodox gameplay function; it tells you if you’re on the right track. As you put together pieces of a level’s puzzle, more storyline comes to light.
Another cool story feature here is the fact that there’s a hidden storyline that unfolds alongide the main one. That hidden storyline can be accessed by tapping on indicated words in levels. Like the main story, making any sense of this secondary story depends on grabbing all the right words in levels.
Along with the intriguing and innovative main story and core gameplay, there’s also a Master Mode that tasks players with solving puzzles in a limited number of moves. The fact that this isn’t how the core gameplay goes is a bit unorthodox in and of itself – many casual puzzle games rely on limited moves to provide a degree of difficulty. Match-three and blast games jump immediately to mind.
G30 first hit iOS back in May of 2018, and it didn’t take long for the indie puzzler to start racking up awards. Its unique style and premium model set it apart from most other mobile puzzlers out there. It’s an ad-free experience with no in-app purchases, for a meager asking price of $3.99.
Impact: The mobile gaming space is the kind of place where anybody with a good idea and the skills to bring it to life can find massive success, and this game is no different. Innovation is a key aspect of the mobile gaming scene, even if just about every successful game spawns an endless deluge of copycats.
G30 is undoubtedly no different. Look for a number of dramatic puzzle games to pop up in the coming weeks and months as G30 works the Android casual gaming market and climbs up the charts, the same way it did on iOS. That’s not a bad thing, of course – the mobile space could definitely use more games that tell a cohesive and coherent story, especially when they’re paired up with interesting gameplay.
