Shapist review: mind officially blown

Puzzle games rarely trip me up. Most of them spend the first dozen levels holding my hand and making sure I understand every trick before busting out even a somewhat-challenging puzzle. Those bore me. Qixen-P Design’s Shapist, on the other hand, threw me right into some challenging puzzles from the get go and left me, for lack of a better word, truly puzzled.

Shapist is a block-shifting puzzle game for the iPad that has you maneuvering blocks so that the core piece is not being touched by any of the surrounding blocks. This may sound easy enough, but seeing how it is a puzzle game, Shapist won’t just let you just put the blocks wherever you like. The board is designed so that each block has very limited maneuverability and you have to position the blocks as to make room for others. Simple yet challenging. A perfect combination.

This puzzle game does throw in a couple game changers that add a lot to this old puzzle mechanic. The first one you will run into is a magnetic block which, like a magnet, attracts and repels other blocks. This can make maneuvering blocks very tricky, especially when it connects two blocks you don’t want connected.

One aspect of Shapist that I really enjoyed was that there was no handholding. There was no tutorial of any kind. It immediately opened up into the first level and I was on my own. I was able to intuitively figure out exactly what I needed to do, and felt a sense of accomplishment in doing so. This is a credit to how great and simple the concept behind Shapist truly is.

Keeping with its simplistic nature, Shapist has opted for a very lackluster look and sound. The blocks all have a very dull color and have a basic design. The sound is incredibly soft, and is also very easy to ignore. There are almost no sound effects in this game aside from when you separate magnets or restart a level.

Now, that does not mean that lack of visual and audio stimulation is a bad thing. It just means that the focus is on the puzzle, rather than the wow effect that some games go for. That being said, it would have been nice to have a bit more sound effects.

Shapist is a wonderful puzzle game that left me incredibly satisfied. That being said, I question whether or not the game is worth the $2.99 that Qixen-P Design is asking. I thoroughly enjoyed playing through Shapist, but I don’t believe it warrants such a price tag. If you are looking for something to test your spatial reasoning and don’t mind paying a couple bucks for it, you can find Shapist on the App Store but only for your iPad.