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Your iOS or Android Game of the Week - Splice: Tree of Life

In your genes

Your iOS or Android Game of the Week - Splice: Tree of Life

One of our jobs here at Pocket Gamer Towers is to sieve through the hundreds of apps that hit the App Store and Google Play every single day and unearth the gems.

Lately, though, we've been giving you, our glorious readers, the chance to have your say, too. Basically, we've been giving you the opportunity to tell us your favourite game from a shortlist of the week's best releases.

We've now tallied up this week's votes - from comments on the site, tweets on Twitter, and votes in our Facebook poll - and the winner is: Splice: Tree of Life (for Android).

splice

We're no strangers to the charms of Cipher Prime's genetic puzzler. We gave Splice a rare and much sought-after Platinum Award - the only one we've given in 2012 - when it hit iPad back in August.

In our review we called it "an effortless and elegant puzzler," and said "Splice is a wonderful expression of the freedom the App Store can offer".

So what is Splice, other than a movie of questionable quality starring Adrien Brody? Well, it's a puzzle game where you manipulate strings of molecules to make them fit in a pre-determined shape.

That might mean moving blobs of genetic code, splitting strands of DNA into two, or removing entire strings. It means thinking several moves ahead, rewinding and trying again, and learning the game's intelligent ruleset.

It's all presented with the utmost elegance. From the dreamy visuals to the understated piano soundtrack, Splice is one of the most well presented games on mobile. It's simply beautiful.

And now, thanks to the Humble Bundle 4, it's available on your Android. You can pay whatever you want - as long as it's more than a penny. We recommend giving a little more than that, though.

Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer