#pocket tactics

[tearsofrefugees]

We. The Refugees: Ticket to Europe tells gaming’s most ignored story

The Pocket Tactics team loves finding indie gems for Switch and mobile, and We. The Refugees: Ticket to Europe is our latest find from Digit

[n0wak]

Victory dance. We’ve only done these games of the month round-ups a couple of times, but this month we have a first: two PT contributors chose the same game. Twice. When I poll the writers for this feature, everybody responds individually so as to not prejudice anybody else on staff, and in August and September we got all unique choices. But this month we found ourselves in enthusiastic agreement about a couple of games. Paint it Back iOS Universal, free Interview with creator Edward Brown, 1 October Paint it Back sank its blocky black teeth into me about fifteen seconds after the second training level began. It’s a puzzle game similar to Minesweeper or Sudoku: you have to study the board full of numbers and deduce which is the next safe move. The whole thing has a kooky painterly theme and a layer of polish befitting Popcap itself. That makes sense since the developer Edward Brown is ex-Popcap, and it’s clear when he left he took all the charm and elegance with him. This is the best kind of puzzle game because you never need to resort to mad, flailing trial-and-error. The answer is always staring you right in the face. If you get stuck, you’ve got only yourself to blame, never the game. Thus the game’s enjoinder to “paint only what you know to be true.” If I painted only what I knew to be true of Mr. Faraday he’d be in jail by nightfall. [I've got the key to your safe deposit box, FYI -- ed.] Or perhaps they’d nab me for violation of obscenity ordinances. Lucky for us both, Paint it Back’s 30-plus levels are more pleasantly themed, though “conjoined twins in a turtleneck” ought to ring a bell, yes Owen? –Phil Scuderi   Paint It Back, as you’ve already heard, adds a dash of personality and whimsy to picross, an otherwise dry exercise. I’m not ashamed to admit that it put my legs to sleep on the toilet multiple times. I have only two things to add: first, the attention given to the method of fastforwarding through the opening cutscene warms my heart right down to the cockles. Second, as a result of this game I have learned that it is impossible to gift an in-app purchase, which is the only problem I have with the pricing scheme the esteemed Edward Brown eventually settled on. Upon reflection, I am a little ashamed about the toilet thing. –Kelsey Rinella Pandemic: The Board Game iPad-only, $6.99 Review: Pandemic The Board Game, 7 October After playing it for a month now, Pandemic has yet to lose its shine. This is truly a great boardgame port, and one that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with apps like Agricola, Eclipse and Carcassonne. I love playing solo controlling all 4 characters, I love the visual and audio effects, and I just enjoy the hell out of trying to save the world. Even after 20+ games, there is still that tension that comes up when you have several fully infected cities and one bad card draw can cause an avalanche that will send you to, yet another, defeat. Every game, win or lose, has an epic feel to it. What more can you ask for from a game that you can finish in 10-15 minutes? –Dave Neumann   The first time I booted up Pandemic and saw how pedantically it replicated the board game it was based on, I prepared myself to hate it. In Pandemic the Physical Cardboard Game, little wooden cubes represent the diseases infecting the world’s cities, and in Pandemic the Digital iOS Game, they’re still there. I mean, come on — you’re making a video game. You can literally choose anything to represent those terrifying diseases, and you’re using cubes. It’s a testament to how exceptionally well-crafted the rest of the game is that those cubes do indeed become terrifying. I’ve been playing Pandemic as a solo game almost non-stop this month, and it’s possibly the most cinematically dramatic iOS game experience of 2013. Imagine if they didn’t have the cubes. –Owen Faraday 10 iOS Universal, $0.99 I have a love/hate relationship with puzzle games of this style. I dislike the often strict solutions where you’re not deducing a puzzle as much as the puzzle designer’s thought process, but I do enjoy the occasional “a-ha” moments when the entirety of a level’s existence and all its possible outcomes is visible in your minds eye. This Sokoban meets drop7 puzzler follows a lot of conventional design patterns but it’s a great, if still incomplete, little package for a commute or a minute of spacing out. – Mike Nowak Owen Faraday Pocket Tactics’ Games of the Month: October 2013 Pocket Tactics Pocket Tactics -

Pocket Tactics’ Games of the Month: October 2013 http://ift.tt/1f8bnN3