Happy belated Easter, I guess! I traveled a bunch this week, and didn't have access to my regular gaming setup, so I did some mobile gaming! The backlog took a back seat this week, but I DID manage to squeeze a few hours of backlog-cleaning in. Onto what I played this week!

Stack

Stack is a game by Ketchapp, which in my experience create games with a single gameplay hook and then pretty much leave it at that - Stack definitely follows that pattern.

The goal of the game is to... Stack tiles on top of each other. The tiles move diagonally and you have to, with the help of a timed "button"-press, get the moving tile to fall on top of the previous one, as aligned as possible. If the two most recent tiles aren't aligned, the part of the top tile that is outside of the area of the bottom tile gets shaved off. This process is repeated until you've shaved off so much of the tiles that it becomes pretty much impossible to line them up. There's only one mode, a score attack mode, but the reason I spent about 8 hours playing this mindbogglingly simple game is because it is a great game to play while listening to podcasts. I'd fallen behind on a couple of podcasts, so when I was on my various train trips and even in bed this was a great way to occupy myself so as to avoid a completely passive podcast listening experience. It also helped that you unlock skins for the tiles by playing, so there was always that carrot on a stick. Is this what mobile games are?

Clash Royale

After hearing all the buzz here on GiantBomb and on twitter, I decided to download Clash Royale and see if it lived up to the hype. And it did, mostly, it's just that it didn't really fit into my life while I was traveling and when I'm at home, I have another game about building decks and doing my daily grinding to fill out a collection of cards (Hearthstone). I managed to get into the second arena (arenas are basically ladder ranks) by playing it a bit here and there, but I think the magic mostly passed me by.

The effect this game had on me was basically that I was reminded that Hearthstone exists on iOS as well, so I downloaded and played that instead. That's not a knock against Clash Royale though, I think the game is fine, it's just not for me.

Evoland 2: A Slight Case of Spacetime Continuum Disorder

This was the game on my backlog that I managed to play for a few hours when I was actually at home, and so far I'm really digging it. I played the first one and really enjoyed it, and it seems like they've expanded on the ideas in neat ways.

For those unfamiliar, Evoland was a game where you unlocked new parts of the game (color, sound, the ability to move vertically, the ability to attack, etc) as you went, and while it was a neat concept it relied on referential humor and the novelty of finding those "upgrades" to the game to keep you going. It was also very short, clocking in at about 3 hours, and necessarily so because the concept - although neat - wore thin very quickly and it kind of dragged a bit, despite its brief length.

In Evoland 2, it seems the developer has found the winning formula for how a game like this is supposed to be structured.The referential humor is still there, but there is also an interesting story behind it all. The game doesn't constantly upgrade itself like the first one did - the changes in art style and fidelity (8-bit, 16-bit and 3D) happen at key moments in the story, and is more than a novelty. It really works as an accentuation of a plot device, I feel like (though it would've been a nice touch if the HUD changed between the "time periods" as well). The actual gameplay has so far mostly been a clone of top-down Zelda (our protagonist is even left-handed) with a few deviations, most notably Professor Layton-style puzzles and some 2D platforming thrown in for good measure. Again, it does feel kind of referential even in this regard, but it's fun! I'm also looking forward to the JRPG and fighting game bits that I've seen in screenshots of this game. As stated, I'm pretty early on (or at least it feels like it), but I'm definitely looking forward to playing more of it next week.