Apple Arcade reviews: Puzzle games edition

Simon’s Cat: Storytime

The second mobile puzzle game based on popular YouTube channel “Simon’s Cat” was a recent addition to Apple Arcade.

The game starts out with a nice animated video in the style of the YouTube videos, but it only serves to make the animation of characters in the game engine appar jarring afterward.

Unlike the previous match-3 style game, Storytime ‘s puzzles do not involve moving pieces, but rather punching out sections of two or more matching adjacent tiles within a limited budget of “moves.” Completing a level gets you a star, which is used to complete cleanup tasks around Simon’s property and advance the story. Your efficiency in puzzles is rewarded with coins, which you can use to buy extra moves and boosts should you ever run out.

Variations on the puzzle level’s goals don’t take long to appear. By the time you’ve solved 10, you’ve cleared a bath for an object to make it to the bottom of the field, and knocked out special tiles by making matches next to them. Shortly after, you’ll be tasked with multiple types of goals per level.

The game is put together well-enough, but it just wasn’t hooking me. I’m not feeling the Apple Arcade games based on IP I enjoy, so it was time to try something new.

---

Cut the Rope Remastered

By which, I mean new to me. Cut the Rope was an early hit on iOS, and Apple Arcade has brought it back just so I could try it, I presume. I was as late to the smartphone party as I was to the console party, I came long after Cut the Rope ‘s heyday ended.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but your job in this game is to cut at least one rope. Each level tasks you with guiding a candy attached to ropes to the waiting mouth of a baby… thing. You’ll need to cut the ropes just so to guide the candy, with both timing and motion playing a role. Each stage adds the additional wrinkle of trying to collect all three stars that are positioned just so as to create one true solution to the puzzle.

Rooms quickly ramp up in complexity, with multiple candies, barriers, new methods to move the candies around, and attaching all manner of things to ropes, including little Nibble-Nom.

Cut the Rope Remastered proved to be a much better brain teaser than Simon’s Cat. I really wanted to study each puzzle to collect all the stars, rather than skate by with the least work possible just to advance faster.

---

lumen

Lumen tasks you with solving iterative puzzles presented by an inventor’s box in order to rediscover their notes. Because a unique contraption with complex moving parts is more likely to withstand the test of time than paper. Look, I don’t try to understand geniuses, they’re on this whole, other incomprehensible level than regular folks like me.

The puzzles involve guiding light from a source to a destination (and through three stars; it’s a mobile puzzle game, so it is required by law to have a three-star rating for each level) in order to develop frame after frame of a film the inventor left behind.

Lumen starts off easy enough, with few spaces on the grid and no extraneous parts to the puzzle. But as you go, the grids get larger and denser, goals multiply and new pieces that affect light beams in new ways are added to the layouts. But if you pay attention to the core rule that there’s no point steering light off the board without it reaching a star or goal, your first moves are often decided for you. And the puzzles I solved already were pretty surmountable no matter how complex they were because that head start was simply too useful. You can logic your way right through each of them.

Each time a new element is added to the puzzles, the game drops a handful of easy puzzles to get you acclimated to it when one or two would have done just fine. It feels like it keeps resetting the difficulty curve with another ramp up and messes with the pace of the game. I’d suggest planning your play sessions around these “resets” as I found it more forgiving to start anew later and use them to smoothly get back into the swing of things.

The backstory of the puzzle box itself and its creator’s other inventions serve well enough as a motif to go along with the atmosphere and design choices, but are rather less interesting than the gameplay. Luckily, the bite-sized chunks of lore come and go briskly, and let you keep on going at your own pace.