Reky is like playing inside an abstract print
Arts and minds.
It's EGX 2019 weekend! Over the next few days we'll be bringing you quickfire impressions of some of the highlights from the show floor here at London's ExCel centre. You'll find them all here - and if there's anything out there you want to bring to our attention let us know!
Did you ever look at some arty graphic sketch, up for sale for way too much money in a bougie print shop and think: you could make quite a fun game out of running about in that? No? Well, at some point I probably have, and now the next time you're pootling around a shop like that you will. And you will be thinking about Reky.
In Reky you are a dot, and you must navigate a tangled knot of arty graphic design by solving a tidy little logic puzzle, one stage at a time. It's a neat idea and it translates, through a team that has a clear eye for style, into a beautifully simple set of brain-teasers that feel like a deep, centering breath in the corner of a quiet museum.
The puzzles themselves are a nice level of difficulty, doing all the things you want by gradually scaling up the complexity and playing with the odd mechanic just as you begin to get comfortable. On the screen is a twisted, abstract object, most of which in plain white, against a flat colour background.
You need to move your little dot from one end of the object, or frame, or whatever you call it, to the other. Click on a tile on this object and the dot will hop there - if it can. There's usually some kind of obstacle in the way: coloured cubes, of which there are few, can be moved to help you get past it.
Where the clever twist comes in is the dot, usually black, can absorb the colour of one of those coloured cubes when its on top of one, and absorb its properties in the process. So, you tap the one blue cube to see it moves up two spaces when you do so. Then you go to the blue cube, take the colour from it, and plonk that into a blank cube, and then that one moves up two spaces when you tap it. It starts simple, it ramps up, and soon you're spending a good few minutes on each little chin-stroker until it clicks.
Reky's actually out now - as of just a few days ago - on the iPhone App Store. I played on PC here at EGX, and the team at developer beyondthosehills has told me it'll be out there on Steam and other PC stores, plus Android, very soon. There's also a Switch version in the works.