GameCentral examines Bethesda’s new mobile game The Elder Scrolls: Castles, as indie smash hit Balatro finally comes to smartphones.
Along with Bethesda’s heavy hitter The Elder Scrolls: Castles, this month also sees the arrival of the awesome Balatro on mobile and the crowdfunded, pared back and apply named idle game Cube Farm.
Machine Yearning
iOS & Android, Free (Tiny Little Keys)
Each round of Machine Yearning gets you to associate made-up words with blocky symbols and colours. So you could decide that ‘sinfu’ means a space invader on its side, and that ‘cachac’ means turquoise.
As the round continues you’re asked to define more words and colours, before verifying them, which requires having your puny human memory repeatedly tested with different combinations of the shapes and colours you’ve already defined.
Cute sound effects and multiple pop-up bonuses garland your victories, although you’ll need to buy a single microtransaction to don the little pixellated hats you win, in a game that gets progressively more mind-bending as you advance through its levels.
Score: 7/10
The Elder Scrolls: Castles
iOS & Android, Free (Bethesda)
To look at and play, The Elder Scrolls: Castles is a bit like Fallout Shelter: Medieval Edition. In it you’re the ruler of a faintly Tamriel-themed kingdom, whose castle is in need of renovation.
Splitting your time between making decrees, adding rooms, then building and staffing various resource-generating pieces of wooden machinery, you’ll constantly need to keep an eye on your levels of grain, which feeds your people, and oil, which keeps the lamps lit.
The process requires no skill whatsoever, its increasingly complex chains of dependencies governing what you can do when, with systems balanced just slightly short to encourage use of its aggressively advertised microtransactions.
Your castle itself may look unique, as you build eccentrically-shaped rooms and staircases, but your courtiers look like Wii-era Miis, and the fundamentally uncreative nature of its gameplay makes it a depressingly pedestrian experience.
Score: 4/10
Balatro
iOS & Android, £9.99 and included with Apple Arcade subscription (Playstack)
Although absolutely no prior knowledge is needed, Balatro uses the mechanics of poker hands as the foundation for this endlessly fascinating deck-building roguelite.
From its knowing mock 16-bit art style to the perfectly metered sound effects and music, Balatro is rarely less than utterly compelling and playing on a touchscreen is, if anything, slightly more intuitive than using a mouse or controller.
It’s a real coup for Apple Arcade to add this to its games roster, but also excellent news for Android users and non-subscribers that you can simply buy it in the App and Google Play stores.
Score: 9/10
Unforeseen Incidents Mobile
iOS & Android, £4.99 (Application Systems)
Originally released on PC in 2018, Unforeseen Incidents Mobile is a charmingly traditional point ‘n’ click adventure with a lovely art style, great music, and a Broken Sword-esque whacky sense of humour.
Navigating the beginnings of an unspecified fever, that makes victims bleed profusely from various orifices, you’ll need to explore, chat to the locals, and make artful use of items in your inventory to solve the frequent puzzles.
Normally when point ‘n’ clicks make their way to mobile, they add a button that reveals all the interactive objects on screen. Its absence here is missed, but despite the frequent need for random tapping, the superb script and human-seeming characters make it a continual delight.
Score: 7/10
Monument Valley
iOS & Android, included with Netflix subscription (Netflix)
We’re not even sure whether it’s legal to own a mobile without downloading a copy of Monument Valley, but on the off chance you’ve managed to hold out this long, Netflix has added it to this month’s list of subscriber games.
Its mellow gameplay involves directing a tiny figure around perspective-shifting levels, with proceedings leant the mysterious and moreish atmosphere of discovery that made Sony’s classic Ico so compelling.
More excitingly, this is just the prelude to the December launch of Monument Valley 3, and while its first sequel wasn’t all that different, the opportunity to tinker with brand new levels is more than worth the price of admission.
Score: 8/10
Cube Farm
iOS & Android, free (Tarot Focus)
This is incremental gaming stripped back to its bare essentials, in this case a series of 3×3 grids into which you plant one of three crops, that are ready to be harvested in seven seconds.
Buy more plots until you can eventually afford the next level up: a 3×3 grid, each square of which is a 3×3 grid. At this point you gain the ability to slow the maturing process down to seven minutes, in return for vastly increased yields.
Simple, mildly hypnotic, and with microtransactions that are purely about sending tips to the developer, this was originally a Kickstarter that set out to build a balanced, long term idle game that wasn’t pay-to-win. Mission accomplished, even if it does lack the majestic, constantly changing challenge of Unnamed Space Idle.
Score: 7/10
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