Welcome to this week's Out Now, your gateway to the weekend. Lots of quality puzzle games hit the digital shelves this week along with a Viking in search of Valhalla and a pizza delivering ninja.
Topsoil (iOS and Android)
Topsoil is a shape-matching puzzle __game with a gardening theme. It serves up a steady stream of flowers and other plants that you must place in one of the squares of your garden. The goal is to group the same plants together so that when the shovel icon comes along you can harvest the whole group. You lose the __game when the board fills up and you can’t clear anymore plants. Topsoil is a high-score chaser and the more you clear the more points you get. Gameplay is further complicated by the fact that harvested squares change colors, and you can only match plants within the same color soil. It’s a challenging game with more tactical crunch than first meets the eye.
Baikoh (iOS and Android)
Baikoh is a word-smithing game with some Tetris-style pressure. You start the game with a bunch of lettered blocks on the game board and more continuously fall as the game goes on. You clear blocks and score points by spelling words. The game is lost if the blocks reach the top of the game board. Don’t let the pressure push you into errors, proper spelling is critical. Three failures in a row results in a punishment—a full row of letter-less blocks comes crashing down, cluttering up your game. This one worth a shot for any word-game aficionados, it’s free-to-play with optional ads. The game does have a store option with “soon” next to it, so it seems they will be selling something down the line as well.
Invert (iOS and Android)
In Invert your goal is uniformity—you want all of the tiles to be the same color. You do this by selecting a row or group of tiles to flip them to the opposite color. It’s harder than it sounds once you get deeper into the game, though gamers with good pattern recognition will likely excel at this one. Invert offers a couple different ways to play. You can go with the campaign mode which requires you to solve the puzzle in a certain number of moves, or, challenge mode where it is you versus the clock with no move limit.
Zhed (iOS and Android)
An order-of-operations puzzler, Zhed is all about figuring how to fill in the tiles of a grid to a specific spot. Each level has squares with a number in them. The number represents how many other squares it can extend into and and fill in. It’s easier done than said and makes for interesting gameplay, especially as you advance in levels. Zhed is free-to-play with IAPs to buy hints.
Die with Glory (iOS)
Tired of puzzles? Ok, how about this: Die With Glory is an adventure game where you must guide Sigurd, a Viking warrior, to Valhalla and the afterlife by helping him die gloriously. You’ve tracked the storied career of Sigurd, and the man has quite the resume, now he’s off for one last campaign. It’s the final chance to set in stone his worthiness to enter Valhalla…so long as he dies gloriously, that is and not, you know, as a result of some Darwin-award winning action. Die With Glory features seven locations, a decision/action tree that affects the story, and a comedic rather than dramatic style. There’s castles, armies of undead, rivers of lava, dragons, and time travel.
Antitype (iOS)
Borderleap--makers of Minimize, the Harmony series, and other games—are back with a new puzzle. Antitype is a word game and where you must decipher a pair of antonyms based on the clues provided. “Temperature” for example leads you to “hot” and “cold.” Figuring out the right words is only part of the trick, you must unscramble them as well. You do this by tapping on a letter. When you do, adjacent tiles move forward one letter of the alphabet. You can only advance letters a certain number of times before they become locked in place, so indiscriminate guessing won’t do here.
Ninja Pizza Girl (iOS)
Ninja Pizza Girl is a fast-action platformer based in a dystopian future where there is only one way to get a pizza delivered quick: underpaid teenage ninjas. The game tackles some serious topics through.
In a world where slums teeter on top of skyscrapers, where powerful mega-corporations exploit the poor and where quality pizza is hard to come by, Gemma must fight to keep her ideals, her family and their business intact in face of the most merciless enemies known to any teenage girl – other teenagers.
The jerk-potential of teenagers (and let’s face it, many adults) is well known. Bullying and self-esteem are serious parts of growing up and this game tackles it head on, which you don’t often see in a game. This one is still mostly about the action, but if you like games with a positive message Ninja Pizza Girl is worth a look.
That's all for this week's edition of Out Now. Seen anything you think we've missed or played any of the above? Let us know in the comments! None of the above are currently scheduled for a full review, but keep your eyes peeled on the site for future content.
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