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- Price: $3.99 (Get It)
- Version: 1.0
- Official Site: Steph Thirion
Difficulty is a risky balancing act, especially in the iPhone arena. Make your game too easy, and users are likely to get bored quickly. Make it too difficult, and they’ll get frustrated before seeing all it has to offer. A gently ramping difficulty curve is an ideal solution for any game, but this often requires much more development time than is financially feasible, especially for games that are mostly being sold for less than $5 each.
This is the biggest problem with Eliss, an otherwise elegant and altogether beautiful puzzle game. The underlying gameplay concept is original and fun, but good lord is it ever difficult to play.
In Eliss, players are tasked with joining and splitting differently colored planets to match on-screen size prompts. To make a planet bigger, drag two planets of the same color together. To split a big planet in two, place two fingers on it and drag them apart. Once you’ve achieved the size demanded by a prompt, drag your planet on top of it and it will disappear, leaving behind life-refilling stardust that you can tap to recover.
It’s all very simple and relaxing, at first. Eliss’s vector-styled graphics work incredibly well in its space setting, and every sound effect and musical cue is perfectly suited to the on-screen action. It creates a soothing vibe similar to the kind you feel in games like Katamari Damacy and the WiiWare title Art Style: Orbient; it’s the sort of game that just feels good to play.
And then you get to the second level, where you’ll lose. Repeatedly.
The main point of conflict in Eliss, as you’ll quickly find, lies in the fact that planets of different colors absolutely cannot come into contact with each other at any time. Should differently colored planets collide, your life bar will drain continuously until they are separated.
This isn’t a slow drain, either — your entire life bar can be depleted in a matter of seconds at any point during gameplay. It’s made all the more aggravating by the fact that new planets will continue to spawn as you try to drag your existing collection of planets around the screen. If a blue planet should happen to teleport from nowhere and land on top of a yellow one, you’d better drop what you’re doing right that instant, or else your game will end, and quickly. Planets continue to slide around the screen when you’re not touching them, too, so odds are good that you’ll accidentally create new emergencies whenever you try to fix any problems that arise.
The thing is, despite its early and drastic rise in difficulty, I can’t stop playing Eliss. Its presentation quality is so strong that I’m willing to overlook many of its flaws. While many too-difficult games have frustrated me enough to stop playing them, Eliss’s simplistic but pleasing aesthetic keeps me coming back for more, even after several failed attempts to complete each level.
Even if you’re not usually the patient type, Eliss will keep you playing for much longer than you might expect. And once you finally quit, don’t be surprised if you find yourself waking your iPhone from its sleep a few minutes later for another try.
Hi Danny,
thanks for the positive review!
I see the little planets are giving you a hard time. Don’t worry, like Sam at AppleInsider wrote on his review, there’s a point where it all becomes natural. And then, believe it, you’ll be laughing at how ridiculously easy level 2 is. There are a few tricks in Eliss that once you discover them, everything will become much smoother. Watch the how-tos closely, they discreetly give some important clues.
But you’re definitely not the first to mention the difficulty in Eliss, and it’s an interesting question, so I’ll take this opportunity to explain why I didn’t make an easy game instead.
For one thing, multitouch is still very new to everybody. We haven’t made the jump yet. Eliss is a fun opportunity to make it.
Also, the difficulty progression was a design choice. I could easily have made 40 shorter levels instead of those 20, and made the difficulty progression gentler. But that would have been boring. You need to feel a challenge, where each step forward is a victory.
I won’t deny it, Eliss is challenging. But as you pointed out, it’s not challenging because the gameplay is flawed or frustrating – you enjoyed yourself and wanted to try again – it’s challenging because it takes a few retries to become natural. There is this sense of accomplishment. You remember how demanding and alien it was before, but now it’s almost an extension of yourself, and it’s bliss.
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