A Gaming Diary
Posts tagged spider
Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor (iPhone)
Aug 18th
All across the vast world wide web you can find people praising this game, so I really don’t need to.
But I will.
I start it up for one level – just one, because I want it to last for a long time – and end up playing for four or five. That’s about my limit, because it does starting feeling a little repetitive by then. I don’t mind overly much, though, because even stopping for half an hour makes the game feel fresh when I come back.
There’s also something of a story. There’s an abandoned manor – can you work out why the Bryce family disappeared? I can’t. I’ve made some things glow. A gravestone and, er, well I can’t remember what else offhand. I don’t know what the glowing means. I don’t know the relevance of the lost items. Was the locket in the well? Why is there a gap in the washing on the line? Does that even mean anything or am I trying to hard?
I get the feeling that I’ll either end the game as baffled as I was at the beginning, or everything will be revealed at the end. I suspect the former. I doubt I’ll be able to work out what happened on my own. If there is an explanation at the end, I may even be disappointed, because the sense that there’s a larger mystery gives the game its atmosphere.
It’s not like Braid, which made you feel stupid… okay, made me feel stupid. It doesn’t seem to be willfully obtuse. It’s just that there is background and there are clues. I may even be trying to read way too much into things – maybe making things glow is just giving me bonus points, or something – but there’s something about the game that makes me feel like I’m not quite seeing everything. And I like that.
Anyway, whatever, it’s a great game, whatever happens with the background story in the end.
Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor (iPhone)
Aug 12th
Sometimes a game just seems to come out of nowhere. I hadn’t heard of this before release. I even ignored the thread about it on the Touch Arcade forums. I kept seeing little mentions of it, though. And then Rock, Paper, Shotgun wrote about it. A PC site, writing about an iPhone game? It must be pretty special.
So I bought it.
And guess what?
It’s pretty special.
I can’t comment on the music, which everyone seems to adore, because I’ve not played with sound on yet. I will say, though, that it looks lovely, the spider moves as a spider should, the controls are perfect for the iPhone and it’s compelling and satisfying.
Basically, you are the spider of the title and you proceed through 2D levels spinning webs to catch insects, then moving on. You have a limited amount of silk, replenished by eating bugs, so you need to work out where the insects go and spin in the right places. Some insects run away from you and you have to herd them into your webs. Some you can’t catch in webs, but have to attack directly by leaping at them. That sort of thing.
It’s just obviously been together with great care. There’s no Lite version to try, but I’m confident that if you spend your £1.79 on this you won’t feel cheated.