For a few years now, indie games have been the new hotness and with the mobile gaming market on a meteoric rise, things are only getting hotter. Bringing some much-needed adventure game content to the mobile arena is indie developer, Launching Pad Games out of New Zealand. This two-man team's polished and entertaining Scarlett and the Spark of Life is proof that great story-based games can be made for the mobile.
Scarlett and the Spark of Life is the first in a four-part series featuring the inimitable Princess Scarlett, a girl who's been kidnapped by a couple of thugs in the service of...well, who knows. And who cares? The star of the show is Scarlett, an independent young woman who's not about to wait around for some moon-faced prince to come and rescue her.
The game is made in the tradition of the best point-and-click adventure games, (and is reminiscent in particular of the Monkey Island series) and is full of amusing dialog and multi-stepped plot complications for Scarlett (and you) to solve. You'll have to use your wits and whatever you can find lying around to escape your kidnappers and devise a means of returning home to rescue your less-resourceful sister Princess Lavender, who's also a kidnappee.
The majority of the game is spent in a picturesque Alpine village full of quirky characters and some insane four-footed beasts that eat smelly fruit and scare horses half to death. It's up to Scarlett to talk to the townspeople and negotiate the bizarre relationships among them in order to build herself an escape mechanism. The game is cleverly designed and hilariously written and offers some of the most elegant controls you'll see in an adventure game. You can talk to people, examine things, move and use items just by tapping on the screen.
In addition to the intuitive control scheme, the game's artwork is amazing and looks like a high production value animated film writ small. If the game has any downside, it's that it's really short at about an hour's worth of gameplay. That said, the game is episodic and represents only one of four separate chapters in the Scarlett Adventures.
If you're an old school adventure fan, you should give Scarlett and the Spark of Life a go. Available now for $2.99 on the iTunes app store,
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