We attended The India Game Developer Conference last week, and we saw a lot of games. Yet one of the titles that really caught our eye was Mystic Pillars.
Developed by Holy Cow Productions, it’s been available on iOS for a few weeks but an Android release is imminent.
Based around the African board game Mancala (there is an Indian equivalent), it asks you to push diamonds around different totems until they match the pattern given in the top right hand corner of the screen.
You only have a set number of moves to achieve this, and although it took a while to get used to we eventually got into pleasing rhythm – despite the increasing number of pillars thrown in across the 100 levels.
A brave move
What’s most impressive of all is that this isn’t a freemium title, or a game that asks you to pay a fee after playing a few levels. It’s a premium title with a $3.99 price-tag on iOS, and it’ll be sold on the same basis through Google Play.
To justify this pricing – rare in mobile gaming, but even rarer in Indian development where casual gaming is often seen as the only way to survive – the developer emphasised the effort put into the presentation.
Especially as – at a basic level – the game isn’t massively complex visually, as you can see from the early prototype version of the title above.
There are 3,000 words spoken across the game’s cutscenes, with a host of languages supported. The story is also not the usual half-baked effort you get from puzzlers, offering up a tale involving Indian mythology unlike anything else we’ve seen on mobile.
So if you’re constantly bemoaning the state of Google Play – especially with the recent disastrous launch of Stadia – then you might want to look into Mystic Pillars when it launches on Android in December. You can stay updated via the developer’s Facebook page exactly when it’ll land right here.
