The Serpent's Coils

Originally published at Technology Tell

I visit the App Store at least once a week. What am I in search of? I couldn’t tell you with any real specificity, just something exciting to rest my thumbs on for a short time. The App Store is a fickle entity, though; apps pour into its digital troughs hourly, easily consumed or wholly ignored by accident. It takes quite the savvy mobile connoisseur to find valuable game contributions in the constant cacophony. A good eye, or in some cases, just patience.

This is this case with last week’s (May 15-21) app of the week, Quetzalcoatl. It’s been available for download since November, but without a prior interest in the misty bog of mobile puzzle games, it could have very easily alluded casual consumers, which would do them a general disservice, as this game is quite good.

Quetzalcoatl is Snake, if Snake was an aptitude test. You learn a lot about yourself when playing it—most notably, how incredibly inferior you are on the scale of creatures with thinking brains. The solution to each problem is usually hiding in plain sight, just a move or two away from revealing itself. Yet its elusiveness is often hard to conquer before your tenth restart.

Like Snake, you slither long strings of pixels around a board. Each board is shaped differently, with blocks of vivid colors splashed in sections of the tiles. On your serpents are spots that match these colors, making your destiny a pretty clear one. When your snakes’ are resting on top of tiles that correspond in color with their birthmarks, you gain your prize: access to another brain trap.

Unlike Snake, the slithery denizens of any given world don’t propel themselves, waiting for your intervention before finally listening to that voice in its head that tells it to embrace the wall and end it all. No, these snakes are patient predators, waiting for your touch and drag. They are stoic in their constitution, never getting any bigger or smaller in the confines of the level you’re on. You have to stay disciplined to keep that serpentine figure.

Quetzalcoatl isn’t consistently hard. In fact, much of the early stages in each level can be solved rather briskly. That’s the most insidious part of the package—you get into a rhythm of success before being slammed by the screeching halt of utter failure. This is true for the five normal and medium difficulty worlds, at least. World six and beyond are jagged cliffs from which to let your sanity and self esteem leap.

Frequenters of 1button’s work should know all about this ebb and flow of triumph and utter hopelessness. Their catalog of titles is stuffed to brim with small games designed to break you. Like ON/OFF and Bicolor, Quetzalcoatl is beautiful and sinister. If the studio’s mastery isn’t elegant and minimalist user interfaces, its grinding away the mental chaff and leaving the elite left standing. 1Button is attempting to stimulate human evolution by force. The lack of intervention by our world governments is a failure more frustrating than any technicolor tangle of serpents.

To try your hand at navigating Quetzalcoatl’s brilliant and effective head-scratchers is to dance with well designed danger at your own risk. If you find yourself organizing table fruit or plastic cups in Target by primary colors, than you are beyond reach. Embrace your new purpose—a sacrifice to the Aztec God of iPhone puzzle games. There are worse ways to go.

#Quetzalcoatl #puzzle #1button