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Indigo Ocho (Updated)

by Eric March on February 23, 2009 at 2:51 pm

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(4 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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App Name:	Indigo Ocho
Developer:	Axolotl Studios	Version:	1.0.0
Publisher:	Gamesmith Studios, Inc.	Size:	3.6 MB
Category:	Logic & Puzzle Games	Price:	Free/$1.99

Indie newcomers Axolotl Studios have just released their first game on the iPhone platform titled Indigo Ocho, and as first impressions go, they’ve made a good one.

Indigo Ocho is a 3D maze adventure starring, of all things, an 8-ball named Indigo Ocho. So the story goes, the tower of the Library of Babel, whence 8-balls were born, has been overtaken by evil and threatens the people of Earth. Your task, as Indigo, is to bring down the ziggurat by completing each level of the maze. Being of a pyramid shape, each maze level is larger than the last, and there are 35 levels you must complete — and you’ve got a time limit to beat on each level.

Naturally, it’s not quite as simple as navigating a maze. As you progress you will encounter balls of other types and properties where you must “possess” them by bumping into them. At first that’s all you must do, but later on you’ll other types, such as nuclear balls that are split into positive and negative charges and must be bumped into their opposites to create a small nuclear blast. These obstacles must be overcome before the exit to the level is unlocked, and they just get more devious the deeper you delve. You do have bonus boxes to collect though; you don’t need to gather these to complete a level, but they will give you bonus multipliers that increase your time score at the end of each level.

The game is entirely controlled by the accelerometer, and superficially resembles a kind of labyrinth game. It even features the same sort of perspective tilt when you tilt the device as I talked about in my review for Wooden Labyrinth 3D Lite yesterday. It is not a labyrinth game by any stretch, though, and its resemblance is purely because it’s a top-down maze game. The graphics here are quite well done, and the themes change every few levels or so, so there is a great deal of variety in the textures, which mixes things up visually and keeps things interesting. They’re obviously not using Unity here, but the performance is very good and the physics work just fine. The sound is good and fits well, though it’s surprisingly quiet; they do use application volume thankfully, but even at full blast it’s hard to hear if you’re in a noisy environment. I do like it when a game doesn’t blast me in the ears with audio, but this is a little too conservative.

The game does tend to be pretty fast-paced, but it’s challenging without being impossible. It can get a little frustrating at times, but it’s not in an artificial or contrived way, and it still makes you want to keep trying. Aspects such as nuclear blasts taking out bits of the tower can be used to your advantage, so it’s all about positioning opposing elements where you want them before pushing them into each other. Overall, Indigo Ocho presents a fun, well-presented and challenging game with a well-defined difficulty ramp that doesn’t get too hard too quickly, but will eventually require some skillful handling and slick moves in order to beat the clock and ultimately destroy the tower.

The game is apparently only free for one day, though I can’t tell when it actually turned up on the App Store, so for all I know that may be today only — so grab this while you can. Otherwise it goes back up to $1.99, which is more than reasonable for a game of this calibre. Apparently, Indigo Ocho disappeared from the App Store for a while, but has returned under the name Indigo Icho: Fall of the Ziggurat, for the same $1.99 price tag, and newly republished by Gamesmith. The old App Store links didn’t work, so I’m updating them to the new one. Unfortunately, because of the change in publisher and the fact that it’s technically a new release (rather than an update to an old one), those of you who already bought or downloaded Indigo Ocho won’t be able to update to this new version and will have to buy it again if you want this new version, which apparently has been overhauled to some degree. Yes, it does kind of suck for those of you who already own it. Just don’t shoot the messenger, k?