Game Reviews

_Prism - Like The Room, if the room in The Room was like, THE UNIVERSE man

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iOS
| _Prism
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_Prism - Like The Room, if the room in The Room was like, THE UNIVERSE man
|
iOS
| _Prism

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_Prism might have one of the worst names for SEO optimisation, but that's probably it's weakest point. Almost everything else it does is a joy.

It's sort of like an abstract retooling of The Room. You're manipulating a series of boxes that morph and mutate as you poke them, but this time they're floating in space.

The discovery aspect of The Room is absent here too. The puzzles you need to complete are presented to you front-and-centre. It's working out what you have to do with them that's the tricky part.

Boxes in space?

Yup. Well, shapes. Well, prisms. You can move around them, and when something flashes white it means there's a puzzle on that plane which you need to solve.

To start off with these are remarkably simple. You need to slide a blue blob into a blue circle. As you solve the puzzles the layers peel off until a glowing shape is revealed in the centre of the screen. Tap that and you finish the level.

Things change quickly though. New arrangements of colours can be twisted around, slid up and down, and dragged from place to place. Soon you'll be rearranging the blocks that make up the dissected shape in order to slot things into the right place.

There are multitouch puzzles, puzzles that rely on perspective and timing, and a whole host of other new ideas that are layered upon the simple, tactile mechanics.

The game doesn't hold your hand though - you're left to figure out what you need to do for yourself. New concepts are introduced slowly, but you still need to get a grasp of what they are and how they'll change the way you work things out.

And it makes for an amazingly engaging experience, full of wonderful eureka moments when you slide or pull something into the correct place and the whole world seems to shift into a new constellation of shapes just for you.

I'm guessing you're going to recommend this

You bet your bottom dollar I am. It has a few niggles, including some puzzles that need to be solved in a precise way even though other solutions should work, but it's still one of the best mobile games out there.

And it simply wouldn't work as well on any other platform. The tactility of the controls, the feeling that you're grabbing hold of some bizarre object and dragging it into its correct place, is a difficult one to beat.

_Prism is an excellent, intelligent addition to a genre that houses some of the very best games on the App Store. And, for the most part, it holds its own with them.

_Prism was developed at Stugan, a not-for-profit game incubator which was attended by Pocket Gamer and AppSpy's Alysia Judge.

_Prism - Like The Room, if the room in The Room was like, THE UNIVERSE man

A brilliant spacial puzzler with some intriguing ideas that works perfectly on mobile
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Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.