Posts tagged puzzle quest

I’m not playing this for long sessions, but I am playing it for a lot of short sessions. I’ll start up, do a fight or two, then put it down. Ten minutes later, I’ll be back.

Here’s a screen shot showing how the text looks on the small screen.

(Don’t forget to click it to see the full size version.)

Puzzle Quest is a great game. I’ve only played the DS version before, but it’s been ported to just about every platform under the sun. It’s an RPG with match-three battles, basically, but I doubt there’s anyone reading this blog who doesn’t know it.

Anyway, I love the game, but had heard both good and bad things about the iPhone version, so decided to try out the Lite. It seemed fine, if a bit cramped on the iPhone screen, so I played until the end of the demo and then wanted to play more. Unfortunately, the Lite version doesn’t let you restart after you finish it, so I had to buy the full version. Yes, I had to. If you’ve played Puzzle Quest, you’ll understand.

Buying the full version isn’t that simple. You can buy Chapter One for £1.19 or Chapters One & Two for £2.99. Um, right. You can’t seem to buy Chapter Two on its own, though, so if I just bought Chapter One I’d then have to buy both Chapters One and Two at later date. Unless you can update from within the app, but I think Puzzle Quest predates in-app purchases. So I played it safe and bought the Chapters One and Two bundle.

I’ve played it quite a bit now. It’s still the same great game, but the text is quite hard to read and buttons seem to be quite hard to push at times, as if the actual area you can press is smaller than the graphic of the button, or something. After playing for half an hour or so without a break I’d realised I’d been staring so hard at the screen that I’d given myself that fuzzy head feeling that’s one step away from a headache, like when you’ve been trying to force your eyes to see a Magic Eye picture.

I really think the developers should have put their RPG font away and just gone with a less atmospheric but more readable normal font for this version of the game. It’s a successful port, then, but not an unqualified success.