Living on the Edge
Earlier this year I became temporarily obsessed with an iPhone game. I played it to the end, then went back and collected all of the extra objects, then played through it again just for kicks to see how much faster I could beat some of the levels. I had “write a blog post” about it on my list of things to do, but before I could get around to that, the game disappeared from the App Store. The game, Edge, had fallen prey to Tim Langdell’s ridiculous trademark claims on the word “Edge” (you can read all about the legal situation on Gamasutra if you’re so inclined).
The post slowly sank to the bottom of my list of things to write about, because I felt silly writing to recommend a game that wasn’t even available for sale, but Edge reappeared on the iTunes App Store a few weeks ago and suddenly I realized that I never wrote about this gem of a platformer.
In Edge, you control a cube that you have to move from the starting point of the stage to the end of the stage on an isometric grid. It starts off simply, with a slightly maze-like stage, and over the course of its levels it adds more obstacles and moving parts that require more and more precise timing. It isn’t until almost halfway through the game that you’re introduced to the concept of “edging”, where you rotate one side of your cube up against a vertical wall while that wall moves to your destination, leaving the corner edge attached to the moving wall. If you move too far, your cube’s side will push up against the wall and you’ll lose your adhesiveness, plummeting to the ground below.
The first time you encounter edging, it’s not even a requirement to complete the stage, just a shortcut for those who know how to do it. Later, you’ll be required to do it for a second or two. It’s when you reach the point that you have to edge for seven seconds, and you realize that you’re doing it without breaking a sweat, that you appreciate the difficulty curve in this game. It’s absolutely perfect— just challenging enough that you’ll find yourself retrying just a few points over and over again, but never hard enough that you want to stop playing. There are even a few spots in the game where you can reach your goal from multiple locations, leaving you to decide which method best suits your strengths, such as fast reaction times and quick turns or methodical patience with planned movements to match a dissolving set of platforms’ patterns.
Edge was the first iPhone game that made me want to play it to 100% completion— I went back after finishing the stages available to me in order to pick up the prisms, and retrieving all of those unlocked more stages, which was a nice bonus. It kept me busy for a long time, and I never had any problems with the controls: I used the “swipe” control scheme, in which you move your finger around on the screen relative from the place where you pressed down in order to direct your cube. It also has a scheme that adds a virtual D-pad to the screen and another one that uses tilt controls, but the swipe method seemed most natural to me. It also has a really handy screen rotation method: you can play in portrait or landscape mode, and all it takes to switch between the two is to put two fingers down on the screen and make a “rotate” motion. I often found myself switching between the two modes depending on the stage and where I wanted my field of view to be.
I’m glad to see that the publisher Mobigames was able to put their game back in the App Store. Edge is a really great game and one of the only games on the iPhone with a beginning and an end that I’ve really become attached to. I highly recommend picking it up.
—Casey
