In this episode of Cost of a Coffee, the Prof and Brian have been playing CollectOrb, the brain child of Peter Daish that first appeared on the PlayStation Vita in May as part of the now defunct PlayStation Mobile programme. Now DaishGames have ported the title to Android and Amazon’s Fire HD, meaning many more people can experience the shear frustration of rolling a ball around a maze in the dark.
Podcast: Download
The premise of CollectOrb is that you tilt your phone/tablet to roll the slightly glowing ball of darkness to pick up cubes and not fall off an edge, which sounds like a familiar concept and it is if you’ve ever played a tilting ball puzzle in real life. The challenge here is that you cannot see more than a short distance around the orb, and because of this you need to be very careful of your surroundings. The scoring mechanism’s all about speed, the faster you complete the levels, the lower the score and the higher up the leaderboard you get. Being swift is beneficial, but the controls themselves seem to work against you a lot of the time.
Strangely, it’s not a rage quit inducing experience, it still made me want to have another go and master the maze. Maybe it’s the haunting atmosphere, or the short levels, or the nicely composed and relaxing music? It’s likely a combination of all these that allow it to walk the line between frustrating and compelling.
CollectOrb is definitely a title that’s worth a look at and seeing as it’s currently only 50p, I recommend you consider giving it… a roll.
Untilt next time!
The Verdict
Andy
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