Daily iPhone App: The Act combines great cartoon art with iOS gameplay
The Act is, I will say, probably one of the most interesting experiments I've ever seen show up on the App Store. I don't know if it's entirely successful, but even at the current price of $2.99, I can wholeheartedly recommend it. It does some very interesting things with interactive storytelling and animation that have to be seen to be believed.
The Act is a game by React Entertainment, a company that has at least one famous 2D animation vet in its background. As you can probably tell by the screenshot above, it's a game that's been entirely hand animated, and the art is just plain beautiful -- the characters pop off of the screen like a Disney movie. There's no dialogue at all, so the story is told strictly through animation and music, and yet it all comes across very well.
The interactive part of the game arrives in certain sections, where you need to swipe to the right or left on the screen to keep "the act" going. This is perhaps the biggest fault of the "game" -- all of your cues come from the on-screen animation, so it's often hard to tell exactly what you're supposed to be doing and when. But the game does get clearer as it goes on -- by the third interactive scene or so, I had a pretty good idea of when I was doing it right and when I was doing something wrong.
Even with those issues around feedback (the game definitely could have been a little more designed for accessibility), The Act still respectably takes some bold moves with its gameplay, and again, that animation is just gorgeous. If you're a fan of games or good old fashioned hand-drawn animation at all, definitely check this one out.
