An immersive design experience that happens to be a mobile game: PUK
You should know by now I don’t do games, but I do do pretty, and PUK, despite the rather unfortunate associations its name evokes (probably because I’m a girl and hockey was not the first thing I thought of…), is the prettiest of things, even when it’s static, as in the images below. In motion, it’s truly beautiful to behold. A sweet and simple little world to dip into if you need to kill some time or empty your mind.
To start, pull the big circle on the home screen towards you. You then have one or more little pucks at the bottom, under a line. The object is to hit the circles above the line. Pull a puck towards you with a fingertip and release it, the way you would a pinball plunger. You’re shown a guide so you can aim.
The line at the bottom starts to fill in with solid white right away, and when it meets the center, you’ve run out of time. (At first I thought I couldn’t shoot pucks past the solid white part, but I was wrong.) If you have a puck stuck above the line because you didn’t hit your target, you have three chances to shake your phone to try to hit the target.
The game gets increasingly difficult, and you have to ricochet your pucks off walls and lines to hit your targets. The sounds — and I abhor game sounds — are unique, and suprisingly compelling. For me, they recalled the trippy synth sounds of the Vangelis soundtrack to Blade Runner (this is a good thing). You can just turn the sound off on your phone, or tap the music notes on the home screen if you want silence.
I don’t understand the scoring, but I don’t care. I’d rather play without being goal oriented. I sucked at first, but I did improve quickly, and it was fun. This one’s staying on my phone. I just probably won’t be using it in any moving vehicles…
Devices: iOS, Android
Cost: $0.99
PUK on the App Store
PUK on Google Play
