Invertical Touch

Invertical Touch is a platform game with a twist. Qube, the hero of the hour, can switch between being black and white.

Any similarly coloured platforms then become solid to him, while opposites can be breezily leapt through (or, in rather more negative moments, plummeted through on the way to his untimely demise).

He's so square

As ever, a platform game can't exist without a storyline, and here it's all about trying to find the portal home, while collecting what the developer calls "lots of fascinating books and scrolls along the way."

In other words, it's not all about locating the exit and sprinting towards it - if you want to three-star every level, you'll need to hunt about a bit too.

Whether you'll want to is another matter, because Invertical Touch teeters on the brink of being annoying far too often. There are various factors that irk, not least the controls, which don't feel especially comfortable or responsive on iPad or iPhone.

That'd be bad enough in a puzzle game, but when you need to jump through a platform and quickly switch colour to avoid being impaled by a flying arrow, it's not much fun when Qube doesn't do what you're expecting.

Other aspects of the game will further sap your enthusiasm to continue. The physics seems a bit odd when it comes to Qube's jumping. Visually, the game presents an odd mix of styles. It's seemingly going for retro, but comes off as clunky and amateurish.

The music's better (there's a very nice head-bobbing electronic number to accompany the Towering Chapter levels), but feels slapped on rather than considered.

And then there's the snag that some of the routes within the levels have seemingly been designed by a sadist. During testing, it became a drag to work laboriously through a long and winding maze, only to switch colour to grab a scroll and find said long and winding maze had to be tackled all over again.

There might be more criticism levelled at times when you make one wrong jump only to fall to the foot of the level to your doom, but at least that puts Qube out of his misery.

And yet there is still something about Invertical Touch that means it isn't entirely a lost cause. New ideas keep coming as you work your way through the 60 levels, forcing you to change your approach.

Occasionally, a level is set just right, temporarily transforming the game into a devious and clever platform-puzzler. During these moments, you can see untapped potential in Invertical Touch — a glimpse of a game that might have been.

The thing is, when you've got glorious, breezy platformers like Mos Speedrun, Bean Dreams, and Mikey Boots, it's hard to make space for what might have been.