by Rojas Oliva, entertainment editor
Fright Heights • Price: free • Rating: Four detached eyeballs out of five.
From Chillingo Ltd., the team behind Cut the Rope and other App Store icons, comes the puzzle app Fright Heights, featuring a loading screen with a detached eyeball that bounces up and down and a helpful tutorial-spouting cat named Scaredy.
The puzzle consists of a hotel, laid out like a grid, with each hotel room a cell in the grid that can be filled by either trench coat-wearing monsters or a cowering demographically diverse human population, who for reasons that never go beyond (maybe) sadistic joy, must be quickly scared right back out. Each floor has a scare meter that has to be raised to three to clear, and you slowly progress up the hotel until the roof signifies an abrupt end to the action and the completion of a level.
The dark, inky quality of Fright Heights’ art design flawlessly translates the Halloween ethos into the game’s dynamics and is only helped by the music; it’s almost exactly what you’d expect from a Halloween motif app with pizzicato intensive orchestral swoons and a feeling of time-is-running-out tension.
The gameplay remains the same throughout and is similar to other puzzle-based apps in that the first few missions are easy to the point of mindlessness and require no strategy or thought to pass, but right around level five, the bombastic ‘You did it!’ that explodes on the screen goes from feeling patronizing to genuinely relieving and brings up maybe a little pride after so many failed attempts. Very quickly, you’ll have to start developing little strategies and planning your moves carefully as the game begins to take on the stress and wonderfully fun gratification levels of something like Tetris.
While it falls in line with many of the other tropes seen throughout puzzle apps (three star scoring systems, having to beat the prior level to advance to the next, simple mechanics being repeated), the heavy focus on the Halloween motif, the distinct art style and genuinely challenging levels (50 in all, so you won’t be beating it any time soon) elevate the game to something much less ephemeral than the holiday it’s based on.
Find Fright Heights on the App Store.
