Good Game Get! Helsing’s Fire

Helsing’s Fire is a puzzle game.

Which admittedly sounds kind of boring, but it’s also a puzzle game in which you slay demonic monsters with a deadly torch and tonic combination. Bad ass.

Also the music is pretty rad too.

In the game you are met with the challenge of disposing all of the monsters on screen using only a torch and some tonics. You need to position the torch to light up the enemies while the game utilizes some slick lighting techniques. Objects will block your light, and as the game’s difficulty increases you’ll have to focus your light on certain enemies, while avoiding other enemies and innocent lady bystanders.

Once you’re satisfied with what your light is hitting, you’ll use a tonic to create a shock wave from the torch that destroys the enemies.

The game’s difficulty lies in placing the torch’s correctly and eliminating the enemies in a certain number of movies because you’re limited in your tonic use.

The game is a good length too at ninety levels, but I did find myself completing some in seconds, while others took minutes.

Ratloop’s Helsing’s Fire is the best game I’ve played from the App Store in almost a month, and while I typically don’t factor in game prices into my traditional recommendations, at only 99¢ you’d be silly not to purchase this game.

Unless of course you hated fun.

- Kyle

Good Game Get! Kometen

Kometen’s real charm lies not in in its beautiful water colored visuals, nor its superbly crafted and catchy background music. While both are charming in their own right, they’re really not the defining points when it comes to the iPhone game’s magic.



Kometen rules because it engages us in such a simple way with non-linear goals that promote the joy of flying through space, attaching our comet to the planetary pulls of Issac Newton’s famous law, and engaging with nothing but inanimate objects and isolation.



We naturally find it exhilarating to fly through space (the notion at least), collect things, and discover new places. All of this is possible in Kometen and no one is telling you what to do, how long you have to do it, and the consequences for not doing anything but fly around aimlessly so are non-existent.

Kometen confirms why we play games.

To escape.

Good Game Get! Lilt Line

Lilt Line for the iPhone is dubstep, the video game. The heavily rhythm and tilt-based gameplay is built on an intensely awesome dubstep soundtrack crafted by 16bit.



Lilt Line at its core is graphically simple and very reminiscent of of the guide this object through the scrolling horizontal cave while not hitting anything games, but remove that shallow comparison and you have a very unique rhythm game featuring a genre of music that has been criminally ignored in rhythm/music games.

The game has two controls, one being tilt, (left or right, controlling the pitch at which the line moves) and the other being a finger tap for when the line touches the white vertical bars which are timed with the music. It’s compelling and fun, and at times very difficult steering and trying to stay in tune with the level’s song. You receive score damage each time you let the line hit the walls and when you miss a horizontal beat bar. The level ends when your score reaches zero, and you must start over.



The minimalist art aesthetic the game conveys crashes into the absurdly layered and complicated, but enjoyable dubstep soundtrack and even though technically it’s a video game, I feel more like it’s a playable dubstep album by 16bit called Lilt Line, rather than a video game featuring music by 16bit.



Imagining that is the case really excites me, because I feel that if artists, game designers and musicians want to team up and do more wonderful, simple, and specific ryhthym games like Lilt Line, then they may very well reinvigorate a genre already becoming stale of countless overpriced plastic instrument peripherals and mediocre music.