Ichi review

Though it has a handsome icon, Ichi doesn’t exactly inspire on first loading, saddled as it is with the overly familiar graph-paper visual treatment favoured by innumerable Doodle-something apps. It may not look imaginative, but the resulting visual clarity ensures nothing gets in the way of the clever realtime puzzles on which Stolen Couch Games’ app is built.

The principle here is simple: guide a moving orange dot over all the orange circles in a stage by manipulating objects within it. The dot moves at a constant pace and will bounce off any flat surface, while a tap of the screen will rotate red triangles – essential for changing the path of your dot - and make blue ones fade in and out. Later come splitters that create multiple dots, switches that control level furniture, blocks to be broken, and warp gates that spit you out in another part of the level. Holding your finger on the screen, meanwhile, allows you to draw a solid line that can be bounced off once before it disappears.

The game also features a built in level editor and the option to tackle other players' designs. At the time of writing, there are already over 500 available.

It’s a sparse recipe that makes for a sometimes infuriating, but always compelling, puzzler which is spiced up by the inexorable progress of your dot. Figuring out how to solve each puzzle is one thing, but actually carrying out that solution adds a layer of action gameplay that proves both satisfying and calming as you trace your way through in the fewest taps possible. [6]

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