Unusual Mobile Games
The regime of voluntary and forced confinement within four walls, continues. And so we continue to talk about what you can do at home, so you don’t go crazy with boredom. Today we’re going to talk about amazing and unusual mobile games. Unique titles that will help days fly by quickly and unnoticed. So if you’re already on your 10th round of playing your video games or tired of playing real money online slots in Canada, we offer you five atmospheric and unusual mobile games.
Lumino City
Bright and colorful, the designers opted for an aesthetic where setting and characters seem hand-crafted from paper and cardboard. Offering a highly original style of play that doesn’t let go until the very end. That said, you can’t say that the game content here is very weak. While some puzzles will make your brain crunch, most of them are not the most difficult. But in front of the beautiful pictures, you don’t even want to pay attention to this drawback. The camera in the game moves like in a real cartoon. All the interactive elements have their own unique “soundtrack”, and the pleasant soundtrack complements it all harmoniously.
The plot of Lumino City is uncomplicated. A girl named Lumi needs to find her kidnapped grandfather-inventor. To do this, she’ll have to explore her town and complete various quests, sometimes interacting with other characters. The game waxes a little pricey. Still, the user is paying money not so much for cool gameplay but for the title’s cool aesthetics.
Prune
This game proves that even such a boring activity as growing plants can be fun. In Prune, each player becomes a gardener whose job is to grow a powerful tree, helping it reach the sunlight. The action of the game takes place on a certain unfriendly planet. Said planet does nothing but try to kill the player’s vegetation. Sometimes it covers them with shadows. Other times it shows a scorching star from behind the horizon, which dries up the player’s trees. Still other times it lets out streams of lava and turning on circular saws.
Despite the apparent simplicity of the process, each level the player faces additional difficulties. You not only grow the tree but trim and shepherd to grow in the right direction, around obstacles. The developers chose a minimalistic style, which emphasizes the feeling of a lonely plant. The music component of the game, in my opinion, is one of the best in mobile games in general. Playing Prune without headphones is pure blasphemy, as it loses half of its charm.
Like many indies and other rando unusual mobile games aesthetics and emotion reign supreme, Prune’s playthrough is not that difficult. What’s especially sad is that for its relatively high price point, it doesn’t have many levels-if you get the hang of it, you can get through it in an hour or even faster. On the other hand, after a while it somehow beckons to pass it again – after all, there is some kind of mesmerizing magic here.
Sky: Children of The Light
The game released less than two years ago has already managed to gain huge popularity and has become a frequent character of video reviews. And the Android version of the game was only released in April last year, but it has already had over a million installations and 150 thousand reviews.
By the way, the aforementioned game Lumino City, released back in 2015, did not even come close to similar results. Behind the game is a rather famous indie studio with the funny name Thatgamecompany. Its masterpiece Journey was praised in its time by many gamers and game critics, calling it “a work of visual and gaming art.” Sky: Children of Light continues the good tradition and slightly resembles Journey in the style of character and game world drawing.
Everything about the visual and auditory components here is at the highest level. At the same time here you will not see the smallest details and finely elaborated backgrounds, because the game captures the scope and scale of the game world. The background music unobtrusively complements the overall picture of the huge game universe.
However, Sky is a far cry from Journey in terms of gameplay structure. Unlike the latter, where you could play together with another player without saying a word, here there is a very strong social component: chats, “friendship” between users, as well as the possibility of giving other players in-game currency and objects. The genre affiliation of the game is rather diffuse, partly close to classic RPGs (World of Warcraft or Lineage), partly to adventure games like Machinarium.
As in a normal RPG, you can “pump up” some of the character’s parameters, up to the friendship skills. Immediately after you have made friends with another player, you can communicate with him only through some vague shouts and gestures and only over time bring your “social skills” to a full-fledged text chat. However, it will also be available to you not during the whole game, but only when you and your friend are sitting on the so-called “bench talk”. There are seven worlds in the game that you can play alone or with friends. True, there is a feeling that the game was created just for the second option – the independent passage of levels is a little bland. Here you should not count on super complicated quests – the game is not very difficult and passed in the same breath.
Well, the important point of all this splendor: the game Sky is free on all platforms, and the passage of the game is quite realizable without a single in-game purchase. They exist here more for visual variety: you can buy a headdress or costume, gesture sets, and so on. This is one of the rare examples of a good freemium game that doesn’t force users to spend money. Due to the free-to-play nature of this game, I highly recommend at least trying it out – such interesting games are rarely found on smartphones in principle, much less in free-to-play form.
The Kreator
An “endless journey” game, Kreator has become popular thanks to a series of games about a shepherd named Alto. If you have played Alto’s Adventure or Alto’s Odyssey, you will understand the mechanics of The Kreator almost immediately. Here you also need to move along the endless horizon, collect coins and run away from enemies. Only instead of a shepherd on a snowboard, we have an abstract creature in the form of a glowing ball. Said ball flies low over the forest, then over water, then over other forms of landscape. Some kind of dark force is used here as the nemesis, to be sizzled by rays of light.
At the same time, you can’t call The Kreator secondary. Despite the similarity of the games, the visual and sound components are completely different. The awesome meditative gameplay will make by completely unnoticed, and the consciousness during the game is as if in a light trance, cutting off all the external disturbers of the peace. The game is completely free. It doesn’t pester you with too many ads and doesn’t force you to make in-game purchases.
Loner
A unique game in which there is no end goal and no points scored. No one is competing with anyone. You don’t have to run or catch up with anyone. Players don’t have to destroy enemies or collect power-ups. You just fly your plane through a black tunnel and periodically turn it in space to avoid obstacles. Instead of a competitive spirit, this game is designed to make you feel calm and serene.
Despite its simplicity, the game is very quickly addictive. The reason for this is the competent graphics and sound. Loner’s mellifluous tracks change and flow from one to another. Getting used to controlling the plane takes no more than a couple of minutes and by the time the appearance of complex shapes in the player they do not cause many difficulties. But if anything, you can crash an infinite number of times – the game will just start over again, as if nothing ever happened.
In general, Loner is a great way to immerse yourself in your thoughts, even in places where it is problematic. For example, in a small apartment with a large “self-isolating” family. Naturally, you should play it strictly with headphones, because the audio track is at least half of what makes this game so great.
Conclusion
Despite the fact that the vast majority of games in app stores are absolutely nothing interesting or unusual, there are still similar nuggets, able to draw not so much donation economy, as an interesting story and a unique atmosphere. Let’s hope that over time, the number of these unusual mobile games will grow, subscription game services can give this process a good “kick”.