TouchGen: Splice might sound like a simple game, but by golly it is not. The object of the game is to replicate cellular structures in a microbiological puzzle. At least that is what I think it might be about. It is highly abstract, and there is very little in terms of introducing the game. I felt thrown into a void with just an outline, and strands of DNA. After playing more than 3000 iOS games the last four years, and reviewing about 1000 of them I have grown to loathe tutorials worse than the plague. In Splice I yearn for a proper tutorial, I yearn to be held by the hand and guided for a bit. The three pages found in the hint section aren’t helping at all no matter how much I want them to help me out.
Gamesblip offers their opinion on Cipher Prime's Splice for the PS4 and PS3.
If you know anything about game design, you know that it’s a process of iteration. You try new concepts and fail until you find something that works, then you refine it until you have something you can publish. The notion that we can take a single brilliant idea and turn it onto a masterwork is nothing but an appealing myth. Puzzle games are different though. To make a good puzzle game, you need to start with a solid mechanic and extrapolate it in all possible directions. You’ll need to have a significant chunk of your development process done before you even know if your mechanic works or not, and if it doesn’t you often need to start back from square one. There are aspects you can polish – timing, UI design, power-ups - but creating something elegant like Tetris or Bonza requires strong intuition and more than a small leap of faith.
PSLS:
"Splice originally released for the PC, iOS and Android platforms back in 2012. This puzzle title comes from Cipher Prime, a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, based developer with a penchant for titles with interesting visual and aural design.
Splice is not different. While it’s a puzzle game first, this is an experiment in sight and sound as well. Perhaps those latter components are what attracted me to it so much when it originally released."
