Game Reviews

Stealth Inc

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Stealth Inc

There's something about Stealth Inc that makes it very difficult to dislike.

For all of its cruelty and taunts, all of the bloody deaths it inflicts on your bespectacled clone, and the grim test chambers it constantly forces you into, there's an obvious love for play at the core of the game that shines through.

Even when you're grinding your teeth in frustration, nothing feels unfair or malicious. The puzzles are so well put together, the jokes so to the point, and the aesthetic so spot on, that each completed level feels like a triumph with a friend, and every failure feels like your own fault.

Hidden in plain sight

The game is all about leading a stocky little clone through a series of puzzling platform challenges. None of them lasts more than a handful of minutes, but they pack in a solid chunk of fun into their short run time.

You'll need to push blocks onto switches, dodge the attentions of violent robots intent on killing anything that strays into their field of vision, and use the light and shade as a tool to make your way past cameras, gun emplacements, and sentinels.

Dying is almost a part of the process, and the shadowy people behind the tests are only too happy to mock your failures and taunt your successes, even going as far as telling you "everyone does that" after a particularly sudden demise.

The controls have been simplified for touchscreen devices, and they work pretty well. Sliding a thumb left or right in the bottom-left corner of the screen moves you in that direction, and two buttons on the bottom-right corner control jumping and ducking.

Other context-sensitive buttons flash up when you need them, leaving the screen uncluttered and meaning you're never really stumbling over your fingers or thumbs.

Clone wars

The controls aren't quite as precise as you might like sometimes, and small corrections are a little on the fiddly side. This doesn't usually matter, but when you're trying to dart into the safety of the darkness, it can be annoying.

Still, there's a huge amount of brilliant platforming here, presented in perfect bite-sized chunks. It might not be the definitive version of Stealth Inc, but for the price it's an absolute bargain.

Stealth Inc

A great iOS port of a brilliant platform-puzzler, Stealth Inc is well worth your attention
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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.