It has an appeal that’s hard to describe and is the perfect demonstration of what iPhone gaming can be. Zen Bound is a meditative game involving wrapping objects of wood and stone with rope. It’s a wonderful game that perfectly exemplifies just what the iPhone is capable of as a game platform.
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I’ve found myself holding my iPhone at a distance during gameplay on the daily subway commute so that bystanders might see it, so impressive are its visuals and gameplay mechanics.Īny reader who finds some degree of appeal to what I’ve just described owes it to him or herself to download Zen Bound and spend some quality time with it.
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And while a PC version of the game exists, its control setup is nothing compared to that of the iPhone version. And the more you play, the easier it is to become fully engrossed, thanks to the increase in skill that comes with experience. Zen Bound really does cause you to get “lost" in a play session. This all comes together to provide a control system that is, in a word, perfect–it truly makes you feel like you’re rotating an actual object in 3D space. The angle of the rope is determined by the orientation of the iPhone. The onscreen wooden objects can be smoothly rotated in any direction with a single-finger swipe and can be spun radially with two fingers. And while screenshots and gameplay videos clearly demonstrate the high level of polish to the game’s visuals, what’s less easily noted is just how well the touchscreen controls have been implemented. When we inquired into the game’s release date with Secret Exit back in January, they underscored the fact that they were more focused on polish as opposed to the earliest release date with Zen Bound. The game features binaural audio processing that, when used with headphones, creates an enveloping soundscape that is truly immersive. A soothing audio track plays throughout with realistic rope creaking sounds that add greatly to the overall experience. The game presents some of the best graphics I’ve ever seen on the iPhone. The objects look very realistic and exhibit high quality texture filtering and glass-smooth animation. The graphics quality of everything onscreen–object, backdrop, rope, and lighting–is superb. (To achieve three flowers requires 99% coverage.)Įach object presented is shown suspended in mid-air in front of a backdrop. It is possible to achieve up to three flowers per object, depending on the percentage of the object that you are able to cover in paint.
Each lantern is marked with a number that indicates how many flowers must be acquired in order to light the shapes above it. Selecting a shape symbol brings forth the indicate 3D object to be wrapped with rope.
Both routes present the player with a tree that winds its way upwards, adorned with a variety of shape symbols, punctuated by lanterns. The former consists of animal shapes, the latter more basic geometric objects. The game features 51 levels across two different paths: Tree of Reflection and Tree of Challenge. But as Secret Exit suggests, it’s a calm and meditative experience. It sounds like a basic and perhaps bland proposition, frankly. Zen Bound involves wrapping various shapes of stone and wood–blocks, whales, birds, and the like–in a paint-soaked rope in order to, as completely as possible, cover them with paint. But I will go ahead and say it up front: Zen Bound is the most polished and ideally suited game created for the iPhone platform. I usually save the overall assessment until the end of the review. A hard question to answer–until Secret Exit’s Zen Bound made its debut. But of those precious gems, which shone the brightest? Which best utilized the iPhone’s unique combination of controls? That was a hard question to answer. And while, true, many (most?) aren’t particularly noteworthy, there are some true gems out there. There are currently over 20,000 applications in the iTunes App Store–a large number of them games.
We knew then that amazing things were to come… And they have. And my first thoughts? Gaming–and no surprise. And when, a year later, Apple announced the freely available iPhone SDK, it was immediately clear that what we’d seen from the iPhone so far was just the tip of the iceberg. So much cutting edge technology all wrapped up in a multitouch / accelerometer-based package. During those two hours we were exposed to perhaps the most innovative mobile device ever created. When the iPhone was first unveiled by Steve Jobs during the Macworld 2007 keynote, most of the people in attendance stared in slackjawed amazement.
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