Google's Da Vinci Code: two weeks in
The Da Vinci Codeweb-based game from Google is on its fifteenth day of twenty-four, and we've had time to figure out quite what the game is all about. It's effectively a serialised puzzle game, with daily challenges which increase in difficulty as time wears on.
What's more interesting is the sheer weight of Google's cross-promotion. For example, a link to the game appears on standard search results, and the game itself plugs into Google's personalised homepage service. While the logic-based puzzles are straightforward, follow-on questions require some searching, promoting Google's more obscure services such as SMS translation.
With the entire Google machine behind it, this game could become very popular indeed -- this seems like a lightweight experiment to test the model, but we wouldn't be surprised if more 'casual' games come out of Google in future.
