The game has been around since the 1960s. Most of us know it from its being packaged with Windows machines for a few decades. While Minesweeper is nothing new, and probably not ranked on anyone’s favorite games list, it would be hard to deny that it has a special place in the hearts of many.
This is exactly what Korean developer Wispsoft was counting on. Earlier this month the studio decided to test the waters with its Minesweeper-inspired mobile game, Spirit Sweeper on crowdfunding site and now butt of South Park joke, Kickstarter.
See: Kickstart my heart(ache): how crowdfunding has worked out for Asian devs
The game has the makings of being a somewhat-inspired spiritual successor to the game that we all know and didn’t particularly hate. Building upon the Minesweeper formula, Spirit Sweeper is pretty simple: you’ve got a tile-based grid, and clicking on one of the tiles uncovers it. Any squares not adjacent to the “mines” will open, revealing only the squares touching mines. The remaining squares will have numbers indicating how many mines it is touching. With deductive reasoning, and occasionally good guesses, you can reveal the locations of all the mines. If you touch a mine, you die. It’s art imitating life.
This in itself could be rather dry for some, and you’ll understand why this game thrived mostly in the pre-internet age. But Yong Eun-jeong and his studio have added a few things that definitely sound like intriguing additions to the game’s formula. According to the Kickstarter page:
Taking place in a fantasy world of golems, witches, and knights, players can unlock and choose from eight different characters to conquer their friends and battle internet strangers for sweeper supremacy.
Who doesn’t enjoy battling “internet strangers”? While they have already added fictional characters and some context to the game, Wispsoft has taken to Kickstarter to help fund the addition of an actual story mode and to help with the implementation of the game’s player-versus-player (PvP) online multiplayer.
The good news is that at the time of writing with two weeks to go, the game is less than US$5,000 away from its goal. The bad news is that the goal is US$5,000. While there’s no reason to be in bad … ahem … “spirits” just yet, mobile fans are going to need to come out of the woodwork. It seems that Kickstarter remains the domain of core developers for console and desktop games.
Still, the game seems like it is going to be finished regardless of how the Kickstarter pans out. The lack of funding will only put some of the late-stage embellishment the studio was planning in jeopardy. Give the Spirit Sweeper Kickstarter a look-see if you’re feeling nostalgic.
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