GAME OF THE WEEK: iShift

June 12th, 2009, 17:04 Posted By: wraggster

Considering the iPhone's reputation as champion of indie gaming and harbinger of the second coming of the bedroom coder, things have been getting a little glossy of late.
Announcements like Firemint's Real Racing point to an emerging trend for polished, finely crafted releases on Apple's device. No bad thing of course, but here at CasualGaming.biz we're always eager to uncover something a little closer to the grass roots of gaming.
Something like iShift, recently added to the App Store for a sofa's worth of loose change. Armor Games' punchy little release is a slap to the face in monochrome, with serrated edges, snarling dialogue and aloof presentation that looks down the nose at you throughout its short life.

A tidy platform-puzzler, iShift is certainly frayed at the edges, but that is its charm, like a well-behaved punk at Apple's wedding with the masses. Each of the game's levels offers a single screen littered with ledges and spikes in black and white, and a doorway that plays entrance to the next challenge.
Placed on a black platform, in front of a white background, your anonymous avatar stands out in the same colour as the floor on which he perches. He can run left and right, and jump, and that is almost the limit of his ability. His other sole talent is to 'shift', which flips the world on its horizontal axis and changes his tint. Suddenly, the faceless protagonist is as ashen as clothes in a Daz commercial, and what was once the background is now the scenery, and visa versa.
The concept is cumbersome to put into words, and to linger to much on the workings of iShift is to explain away the magic.
The fact is that Armor Games' effort is wonderfully simple in practice, and within a couple of screens you'll be shifting between its dimensions of shade without a second thought, leaping from balck to white to navigate some remarkably cunning levels.
A clock counts away through the game, adding a sense of urgency exaggerated further by strands of loose text that hover over the screen. Some goad you on, but most play tricks on your mind, whispering lies about broken save files and resetting clocks.
The game is superbly implemented for the iPhone, and perfect for missing a train stop or sitting in an increasingly cold bath. However, if you still haven't invested in Apple's device, a Flash version titled Shift is available at Armor's website, so you can make up your own mind.
Alternatively, scoop it from the shelves of the App Store for 59p.

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