Level Up

Gaming & app news

Semblance is a puzzle platformer where your character and the world it inhabits is made of a playdough-like substance. “Squish, squash and deform your character to solve puzzles in the soft, bouncy world,” says the description on its website. Each time the block hits the wall or ceiling it changes shape and can interact with the environment differently.

Yet it’s hard to imagine how the small square block slamming itself against a wall in the initial stages of the game could become the pink and purple squidgy world of

Semblance. Ben Myres and Kenyaborn Cukia “Sugar” Kimani, founders of the SA independent gaming developer Nymakop, created Semblance as their final-year project at Wits University in 2015.

“It’s crazy to think that we almost didn’t show the demo to our examiners, because we’d hit a glitch a few minutes before,” says Kimani. But they did show it to Judd Simantov, a game developer who worked with Sony Entertainment’s Naughty Dog, the people behind Uncharted and Last of Us. Simantov loved the game and believed it would do well commercially. It was finally released last week.

The world of the game is a squidgy soft paradise of play that allows gamers to feel their way around and discover their own interpretations of the landscape and the story.

You can bounce around and smash the walls and floors anyway you please to crack the puzzles, collect floating objects and save your home as you play.

There’s been little support of SAdeveloped games, so this is a first.

“We want to show the gaming world that people from Africa can contribute,” says Kimani. Myres adds: “We’re the first ever [game] in Africa that’s been developed for the Nintendo console.”

Myres says that making the game compatible with Nintendo Switch was like scaling a cliff face. Kimani spent many long nights coding as he had to learn new processes in order to work on the Nintendo console. But the leap from backyard coding to landing their game on Nintendo’s platform is a ticket to the big time. The game really suits the handheld console. It’s the kind of game the Nintendo Switch was made for. LS

Find Semblance on Steam and in the Nintendo store now