THINGS WE LOST IN THE SNOW, PT 1: PUZZLEQUEST HIT THE IPHONE
A number of Very Good Things happened over the past week when we were all en route to our various holiday destinations, and I’d be remiss not to recap them, because they were all worthy of mention. One of the most notable, of course, was Infinite Interactive’s RPG/puzzler PuzzleQuest finally making its debut on the iPhone.
Its release was quickly met with a laundry list of complaints: the hyper-anti-aliased text, an engine curiously struggling under the weight of seemingly light 2D assets (though not quite to the extent of the pre-patched Katamari), and an episodic approach that saw just a third of the game packaged for $9.99 (ending just past the game’s first-chapter-closing battle with Dugog), with two more chapters promised that will complete the set. That latter point, in retrospect, is a smart one, given the evolution of the App Store economy where $15-20 releases (outside of highly-niche specialty apps) might as well be lumped alongside Armin Heinrich’s since-removed $999.99 ‘I Am Rich.’
In the end, though, with a week of the game under my belt it turns out that — while all perfectly valid — none of the complaints have managed to truly drag the game down, and there hasn’t been a day yet where I haven’t stolen away enough time to progress by just one more match-3 battle.
With all of the new classes (and, presumably, the content) of the Plague Lord expansion, and newly online-stored save files (to continue progress in later episodes), the iPhone version might not be the definitive version it could have been, but it is the handiest, enough to properly retire the DS/PSP versions and provide a very welcome introduction to its time-sapping addictiveness to the console/handheld challenged.
PuzzleQuest: Challenge of the Warlords [Infinite Interactive, iTunes link]
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