Playing Eliss Infinity
is like taking care of a toddler. It’s fun, stressful and, if you do it wrong,
poop winds up on everything. Ok, maybe not that last part. But, it does
communicate the idea that something incredibly valuable in the universe needs
the constant attention of your hands to live. No pressure.
The original version of Eliss has stood as one of my favorite iOS titles ever since it came out five years ago. The premise is simple:
differently colored blobs of cosmic matter blip into existence and you need to
stop them from touching each other and guide them into spots where they explode
into stars. But, before you know it, you have to do that a whole lot, on a
crowded screen where angry comets and implacable black holes screw up any flow
you had going. The game’s really a test of how quickly you can do information
intake, generate strategy and execute tricky movements. Even when you use all
the fingers you can, the difficulty remains daunting. Now’s it’s been re-invented as Eliss Infinity ($2.99, Apple App Store).
Those little blobs are tricky. Give one too much momentum
and it could go careening into something it’s not supposed to touch. Leave it
in one place too long and a new hazard might pop up right underneath, making
life a lot more painful than it was before. Fuse too many of them together and
you make a much bigger problem for yourself than you had a few seconds ago. However,
the sense of joy and relief that you get when you finish out a tricky level
grows in direct proportion to the challenge. I swear, it’s just like talking my
daughter down from a tantrum. Only when cute jiggly graphics and insanely
catchy music.
With this new re-working, designer Steph Thirion’s made
things just a touch easier with an early warning signal that lets you know when
new blobs will touch existing ones. He’s also added a new endless play mode
called Infinity—which you can see played as a two-player affair in a video done by game-makers Colin and Sarah Northway— that challenges players to keep chaining together starbursts
for as long as they can. On top of all that, a cool musical interface that
unlocks as you clear levels in the main mode.
One of the best things about Eliss is that its mechanics
demand that you play it on a tablet. You couldn’t map this game to controller
or keyboard inputs and get the same kind of experience. It might work but it
wouldn’t feel the same. Years after the iPhone upended the video game
landscape—at least from a business standpoint—that feeling of uniqueness is
still all too rare. It’s a good thing, then, that Eliss goes to Infinity
