Developer Summary

Plunged into a crazy and quirky world, Blörk invites you to embody a Klörx, a tricky alien species that enjoys kidnapping human sleepwalkers while they’re asleep.

What We Think

The game uses the screen rotation feature well and it’s fun to tap the monsters until they go “poof”, but that’s where my praise ends.

Use your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad touch screen and accelerometer to control the environment of a sleepwalking human kidnapped by the alien species Klorx. Tilt or rotate the screen to get your sleepwalker through the levels and around obstacles, or make an upward movement with the device to get him to jump to different levels or platforms. Use the touch screen to move platforms or tap the roaming monsters to disperse. But don’t wake him up!

Touch Screens Don’t Have Snooze Buttons

The exaggerated motions required to get your sleepwalker to jump or dash (a “fast forward” type of move used to get over large obstacles) made it impossible for me to play in public. I had to put the game away after almost elbowing a fellow commuter on the train. The dash feature worked as often as not, occasionally sending the sleepwalker in the opposite direction intended. I also found that jumping to a higher level next to impossible if you allowed your sleepwalker to bump up against a wall – it seemed that there was an invisible overhead ledge that prevented a proper jump, and only after flailing my iPhone around for a while would get him to bounce off the wall far enough for a proper try. This became increasingly problematic in the later levels where the obstacles were more frequent and a bad jump or dash meant your sleepwalker got hurt.

This game started out as a good concept, but the finer points need some tuning. The difficulty in jumping and dashing took away from what could have been a fun game. Instead, I frequently got frustrated and put it away. iTunes advertises a “catchy soundtrack” that you won’t be able to get out of your head. That’s half-true. Sure, you won’t be able to get it out of your head, but it’s one synthesizer-heavy tunes soon become grating earworms.

Dead Man Walking?

The game is a student project out of a school in France, and it seems that the developers are looking to use Blörk to work out some bugs for later projects. It falls far short of the a new way to play platform games as boasted by the developers, but it will be interesting to see what this team comes up with in the future. As for now, I’d pass on Blörk. But hey, it’s free so give it a shot.

Blörk is a free game available for download from the iTunes store for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

[xrr rating=”2/5″]