Game Reviews

Rinth Island

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iOS
| Rinth Island
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Rinth Island
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iOS
| Rinth Island

Platform games don't always have to be about jumping. We've come to expect our avatars to be able to hurl themselves around with gay abandon, but sometimes the very best platforming experiences can come when your feet are very firmly stuck on the ground.

Take Rinth Island, for example. It presents you with a series of broken towers linked together by rickety bridges and wooden scaffolding, and littered with moveable blocks, flippable switches, and spinning creatures who want nothing more than to slash you to pieces.

It's your job to scale these towers, and all without leaping an inch.

Island life

Each level is a simple puzzle. You start somewhere on the tower and have to make it to a goal, which is usually an object you need to collect for one of the varied cast of characters you meet in your travels.

To reach it, you'll have to rearrange the level, pushing giant coconuts, blowing up weak walls with explosive minerals, and flipping switches to alter the terrain.

Stacking objects to reach previously inaccessible walkways is the bread and butter of the game, but clever design and a slow drip of new obstacles and problems means that things are never quite what they seem. Solutions often reveal themselves through experimentation and mistake-making, filling your experience with miniature 'eureka' moments.

No leap here

Once you've completed a tower, you unlock a variety of different game types to replay it with, ranging from speed runs to trying to finish the level in the smallest amount of steps.

It adds an extra layer of excellent and intelligent content to what's already a pretty big game, and really makes you think about the levels in different and imaginative ways.

There are a few problems with the controls. An on-screen D-pad and swipe options are available, neither of which is perfect, but it's only a slight blemish on an otherwise excellent little title.

Cerebral, brilliantly constructed, and with a winning personality that sets it apart, Rinth Island proves quite conclusively that 'jump' buttons aren't everything.

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Rinth Island

A puzzling platformer with its feet firmly on the ground, Rinth Island is a brilliant slice of gaming that almost anyone will enjoy
Score
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.