The first game review I ever wrote on MacStories was for a delightful puzzle game called A Good Snowman is Hard to Build. The team behind Snowman is back with a new game called Cosmic Express that brings toy-like charm to this challenging puzzle game through playful animation, bright colors, and sound design that perfectly complements the artwork.
Posts in reviews
Game Day: Cosmic Express
Game Day: Euclidean Lands
Every so often the mashup of familiar game styles results in something unexpected and delightful, which is precisely what Vienna-based Miro Straka and kunabi brother have created with Euclidean Lands. The game has been compared favorably to Monument Valley and Square Enix’s Hitman GO from a design and gameplay perspective. The comparison is apt but doesn’t capture the uniqueness of Euclidean Lands.
Spark for macOS Adds Email Management Features
The hallmark feature of Readdle’s Spark email client for macOS is its Smart Inbox, which is designed to surface important email messages intelligently. That feature, along with a unified inbox and swipe gestures for common actions, goes a long way to simplifying email management. Nonetheless, email is one of those areas where personal preferences matter a lot. People are particular about how their email is organized, an area that was underserved by Spark. With version 1.2 for macOS, Readdle has begun to tackle email organization, which should make Spark a more attractive option for people who like Spark’s approach to email but want a little more control over how their messages are managed.
Game Day: Link Twin
Link Twin is an atmospheric puzzle game from Bucharest-based indie development studio Lorraine that follows the story of Lily and Tom, twins in search of their lost parents. The constraint that defines the way each puzzle works is that Lily and Tom can only move through their world in tandem - moving one character forward necessitates moving both forward. It’s a simple mechanic that’s beautifully implemented through great art and sound direction combined with challenging puzzles that evolve over the course of the game to keep it intriguing.
Food Genie Review: The Perfect Restaurant Selection Tool
When I’m going out to eat on the weekends, I often run into the same dilemma: my friends and I can’t decide where we want to eat. For the most part, we are all pretty flexible, but narrowing down a wide range of options takes more time and causes more frustration than we’d prefer.
Food Genie cuts the unnecessary back-and-forth by offering random suggestions based on criteria set by the user. Through location data, restaurant identification and a spinning wheel of food, your next set of weekend dinner plans can be a lot less stressful.
Bumpr Expands Your Choices of Where Links Open
Bumpr is a clever Mac menu bar utility that is set as your default web browser and email client to give you more choice of how you open web and email links. That seems counterintuitive at first because setting a default usually means picking one app over another, but here’s how Bumpr works. Instead of opening a particular app, Bumpr intercepts the link and opens a menu of options for each of the browsers or email clients installed on you Mac depending on whether you click a web or email link.
TouchRetouch Review: Object Removal Made Easy
On my best days, I’m a novice photo editor – a lot of my work involves color and brightness tweaks to make my shots look better. If I’m feeling adventurous, though, I’ll try to touch up the pictures and remove unwanted objects, blemishes, or lines.
A lot of times, that ends in horrible failure.
However, TouchRetouch makes me feel like a pro photo editor. In just a few taps, I’ve been able to remove elements in my pictures at my will, making my photos look much better than before. And with a pretty interface and a low price, I think I’ve found another tool to add to my repertoire.
GAget: Google Analytics Widgets and Alerts for macOS
GAget is a Google Analytics app for macOS that started life as a Dashboard widget. These days, GAget resides in macOS’s Today widget panel of Notification Center. If you’ve ever used Google Analytics, you know that its web interface is complex. There’s a place for digging through Google’s many tabs of data, but when all you want are the highlights, GAget is better. It takes Google Analytics’ data and boils it down into cleanly-designed dashboard widgets and alerts that make it easy to understand what is going on with your website at a glance.
Game Day: The Escapists
The Escapists is an award-winning indie title from Mouldy Toof Studios and Team17 that has been available on consoles and PCs since 2015. This week marked the title’s first appearance on mobile systems, though, with simultaneous releases on iOS and Android. The goal of the game is straightforward – escape from a series of prisons with varying levels of security – but there are so many complex variables at play that The Escapists is good for many hours of exploration.