Samsara Game

AN INTERDIMENSIONAL PLATFORMING PUZZLER. Free with IAP | www.samsara-game.com THERE’S SOMETHING IN the water in New Zealand, where the devs of this challenging puzzler reside. Zee, the hooded squirrelchasing protagonist with teddy bear backpack, has fallen through an evil-looking portal into another dimension and it’s your job to guide this gender-neutral child from level to level without perishing. [ Do I sense a theme here? — Ed]

The setup is quite clever. Each level consists of two ‘dimensions’ — for want of better terms, we’re calling them right-way-up-land and the upside-down. (Cue Stranger Things theme tune. You’re welcome.) You guide Zee across a series of platforms using a predetermined selection of blocks that you drag across to attempt to create a safe path from start to finish. Some blocks are just blocks, others include stairs, and as the levels increase in difficulty, the blocks also take on different properties and act differently depending on whether they’re in right-way-up-land or the upside-down. The two worlds act in a mirrored fashion, meaning objects placed below the sizzling line of death will sometimes be reflected above it and vice versa. There’s an element of Portal here, too, as some solutions will require passing through coloured-coded gateways, often transferring you from the upside-down to right-way-up-land.

We played this game on our tiny iPhone SE, which is probably not the best device to use, in hindsight. We found dragging the objects from the top right corner to be problematic, as our finger entirely obscured them when we were trying to lay them in place, meaning we’d often drop them in the wrong spot and have to try again. Luckily, there are no punishments for trying levels over and over, so this is more an annoyance than a deal-breaker, and one that’s no doubt less of an issue on larger devices.

In all, it’s a clever little game that gets progressively harder with each level as it introduces new ways of thinking and new props. Well worth trying out.