The Most Brilliant iPad Game I’ve Played All Year

This is Blek. It’s a simple name for a simple game, one in which all you have to do to win is draw a single line. Which single line? That’s the complicated bit.

Whatever sort of line you draw in Blek takes on a life of its own, repeating until it either reaches the top or bottom of the screen, or hits something black. So, for an early puzzle like this one…

…a single straight line will do. Your initial line cannot touch a coloured circle, so just draw it off to the side and let it shoot home. Easy peasy.

Then things begin to get more complicated.

Here you’ve got to walk your line up (or down) some stairs to hit the mark.

That one’s a bit harder still. Each of those blue circles with the white bits shoot out a bullet that kills the black circles around the other blue bits. I won’t spoil how to solve it, but mainly because I am still stuck on puzzle number 28 of the game’s initial 60.

Basically what players are doing here is creating their own touch screen gestures, each specific to a single puzzle. It’s the sort of game one would have expected to come out on the earliest touch screen-capable devices — the sort of game touch screens were made for.

But then they wouldn’t have had the crispness of an iPad screen to show off those lovely colours, or the fidelity of the iPad’s headphone jack to play musical tones and sound effects generated from human voices. Sounds that make it feel as if there’s an incredibly respectful audience watching, except for a man and a woman who feel like it’s their job to mark the moments with mouth music.

Beautiful on so many levels but so uncomplicated and uncluttered, Blek is the soul of touch screen gaming, a perfect representation of what this sort of play is all about.

Blek

Genre: Puzzle Drawing Thing

Developer: Kunabi Brother

Platform: iPad

Price: $2.99

Get Blek on iTunes