We've spoken at length about Orisinal games here before, often citing how they're the perfect mix of cute visuals and challenging single-player arcade mechanics. Today, we're going to look at a game that's rapidly going to be season-appropriate, at least for us northern-hemisphere folks:
Winterbells, a skill-jumping game that's as addictive as it is adorable.
Winterbells is a cute little game in which you see how far you can help a little bunny jump upwards on a series of bells. Each bell will score you additional points, and occasionally you'll be able to hop on a bird, which will give you a score multiplier. The bunny will automatically hop when it touches a bell, so the only controls you'll need to worry about are left and right, which are done by tapping the respective sides of the screen.
Unfortunately, it hasn't ported over perfectly from the Flash version of the game, and the controls are a bit too twitchy. The game isn't impossible, but it certainly feels a lot harder than it has to be. We had a difficult time getting into any sort of a rhythm with timing our jumps, which is critical for games like this.
Visual-wise,
Winterbells is another perfect 10 from Orisinal, and we'd honestly expect nothing less. The environments are a bit less detailed than we're used to from the developer, but the bunny, bird, and bells are precious. Audio-wise, we thought this game was a miss. We usually love the music that Orisinal games have to offer, but much like
Sunny Day Sky, the music in this game becomes grating almost immediately, and we switched it off.
So, it's certainly not our favorite Orisinal game we've checked out, and the controls could be quite a bit better, but it's still one of the cutest winter-themed games we've come across. And even though it's not easy, we still find ourselves going back to play it again and again.
Winterbells is available for both the iPhone and the iPad, and costs $1.
Who should get in the holiday spirit with Winterbells:
If you're a fan of skill jumping games and you don't mind a steep learning curve, this cute game can offer a decent challenge.
Who can say bah-humbug to Winterbells:
If you hate games that are all about reaction-time and twitch-reflexes, pass on this; it's not what we'd consider terribly easy.
-- Amber Neely (
@SurferAmber)
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