Ivory Tiles

Don’t worry, Ivory Tiles has nothing to do with Stevie Wonder’s lapse of musical talent in the 1980s.

Like music to your ears, it plays a familiar tune with a new underlying chord that establishes this simple puzzle game as something fresh. Ivory Tiles hits the right notes, combining soothing aesthetics with dexterity-driven play.

The game has you moving about tiles similar to mahjong pieces, although they carry no individual value. Instead, they’re placed inside a basic wooden maze, and it’s your job to slide them around the game area until they cover a square (or squares) on the floor of the maze with the same symbol as the tiles.

You move the tiles around the maze either by tipping the handset from side-to-side (recommended) or pushing the game space itself using the touchscreen. Once the tiles begin sliding, though, they don’t stop until they hit something, As a result, the challenge is to manoeuvre through the maze using the walls and obstacles to position tiles toward the goal.

Needless to say, the gameplay is extremely simple and takes no effort to figure out. What’s remarkable about Ivory Tiles is the ingenious design of the mazes themselves. Even when they appear to be unadorned and simplistic, they have the potential to boggle the mind of the most skilled spatial puzzle-solver.

As you make progress, extra tiles might be added to the maze and some puzzles even include two different levels. In these tricky stages, tiles drop down into the lower levels (represented very clearly by a different coloured floor) when sliding over gaps in the grid.

The goal area might be in the bottom or you might be required to drop one of your tiles into the hole so another can slide over the top of it and reach the goal on the upper level.

At times, you’ve even got to fathom ways to put one tile in the bottom level, place another on top of it and slide them around together while vertically stacked, all so you can get to the upper level on the other side of the maze and reach the goal.

Much of the time you’re simply chucking your tiles about, as bending your mind around a solution before setting the tiles off sliding is almost impossible. This doesn’t harm the gameplay, however, as you can’t help but be amazed at the ingenuity of some levels when you see the whole thing suddenly fall into place.

There are 80 of these beautifully-crafted puzzles (and we can reasonably expect more in future updates) accompanied by some soothing, plinky-plonky Chinese music that really sets the meditative atmosphere of this sweetly Zen game.

It’s a well-worn concept given fresh, new life thanks to the magnificence of its design and subtle tweaks to the established game mechanics. If you enjoy a good spatial puzzle game, Ivory Tiles will have you hooked for many pleasant hours.