10000000
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'Photographs' dark narrative masquerades as a mobile puzzle game
EightyEight Games released the popular puzzle/battle game 10000000 and its sequel You Must Build a Boat to great success. Now developer Luca Redwood is ready to reveal his next project for the studio: Photographs. The new puzzle game will release next year for PC, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.
Indie Pinata sale invites you to take a swing at similar games
The Indie Pinata sale offers discounts on 10 Steam games hand-picked by independent developers, available through July 26 at 10AM PT. The catch: You have to purchase or already own one of the games in the sale to get the discounts. That Steam backlog is looking pretty handy right about now. The 10 lucky games are Monaco, The Bridge, Flockers, MouseCraft, 10,000,000, Super Splatters, Dungeon Hearts, Jack Lumber, Triple Town and Contraption Maker. Indie Pinata is put on by Crunching Koalas, the team behind MouseCraft, so this sale features games similar in style to that memorable, puzzle-y tone. "Thousands of games available on Steam make it difficult for enthusiasts of certain game genres to find games that they really enjoy," Crunching Koalas writes in the sale's FAQ. "That's why we teamed up with developers that create games that are somehow similar to MouseCraft. Games we have chosen can be similar in terms of graphics, gameplay mechanics or general feel and we think that if anybody owns at least one title from our list, there's a high chance they will like every other game from our campaign. This is our proposition on how curated storefronts should look like." [Image: Crunching Koalas]
Puzzle-RPG 10000000 on sale, developer reveals sequel You Must Build a Boat
Indie developer Luca Redwood announced that he's working on a follow-up to his tile-matching, dungeon-crawling puzzler 10000000, and plans to offer the sequel for free to anyone who purchased the original game. You Must Build A Boat expands on 10000000's addictive structure with new playable locations, recruitable party members, and tile upgrades that award bonuses for successful matches. Players who purchased 10000000 on Steam will automatically receive a copy of You Must Build A Boat upon its release, and Redwood is weighing his options for a similar upgrade program on iOS and Android platforms. Redwood is currently offering a multiplatform version of 10000000 at a discounted rate of $1.50 via the Humble Store. Purchases via the Humble Widget include a Steam key, along with DRM-free copies of the game for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android devices. If you just want the Steam version of 10000000, it's available for 99 cents through February 10. [Image: 88 Games]
10000000 now available on Mac via Steam
10000000 (pronounced "10 million") is a great game that arrived on iOS last year. It combines a tile-based swiping puzzle game with a fantasy-based progression system to create a very addictive mix. The game is still available on iOS for US$1.99, but Eighty-Eight Games has now made the leap over to the desktop, releasing the app on Steam for both Windows and Mac. As you can see in this trailer, the PC version of the game is similar to the Mac version, and contains all of the various dungeon upgrades and puzzle action that the original is known for. Eighty-Eight tells us that Valve came to them and asked about a Steam release after the success of the iOS version, which resulted in the port that's available right now. There's no Mac App Store version, unfortunately, but getting the game for both Windows and Mac on Steam Play should make up for that. Currently, the title is having a launch sale, so you can pick it up for a dollar off, or just $3.99. If you missed this game on iOS (or just love it so much that you want to play it again), Steam's got you covered.
Daily iPhone App: 10000000 is a great, complex game with a strange name
Some games pare down a core idea to something really simple and elegant, cutting everything else away until one main bit of gameplay shines through. Canabalt is probably the perfect example of that recently -- it's just one core mechanic, done very, very well. But other games go the other direction: they add on system after system after system, and the art isn't in cutting things away, but it's in joining things together, juggling all kinds of balls and knives and torches, and yet still keeping the gameplay accessible and interesting. The recently released (and strangely named) 10000000 is of the second kind: It's a game with a ton of different things going on, but its charm is that even with so much happening, you can still "get it". Essentially, the game is a match-3 title: You can slide various tiles around, trying to match up three or more of them together. But it's also got a very in-depth RPG layer on top of it -- your character runs across the top of the screen, fighting monsters, unlocking chests, and trying to repair your castle (earning up to 10,000,000 points, which is where the game's name comes from). The gameplay's balanced between what's happening with your character at the top of the screen, and the effects of what you're matching on the tiles below. There's also loot, and skills, and a meta-mechanic that has you repairing doors to open up stages, and even bosses to fight as you race through timed dungeons. It's complicated, and the biggest problem with 10000000 is that it never backs down -- you need to keep a lot of systems moving at the same time, and it's not always clear where your attention should go. But there is a nice tutorial, and the stages do smartly ramp you up in difficulty, so the RPG elements keep you feeling rewarded, even when you lose track of what you're doing. The excellent old-school graphics and music deserve a mention as well -- they look really great and retro, and the aesthetic adds a lot to the old-school arcade feel. 10000000 is a really interesting title; it could probably have been pared down just a little bit, but the game's designers do deserve praise for including what seems like every system they could think of, and juggling them as adeptly as possible. The game is available right now as a universal build for $1.99.
