There’s plenty of interesting ways of making a clever puzzle with the limited use of a touch controls in a mobile game, and Uri: The Sprout Of Lotus Creek might be on to something by having your UI elements to be part of the puzzle solution.
Developed by the local indie team of DreamTree Games, this Malaysian-made mobile game is still a work in progress when it is shown at ComicFiesta 2016. While our limited hands-on time showed that it’s still in need of a better polish (we started encountering bugs as soon as the demo build we shown start playing), the idea of thinking outside the box- and the very minimalistic aesthetic has some comparisons to Monument Valley.
The minimalist design isn’t just on the looks- the story here will presented as that too. The developers told us that the character you’ll be guiding could either be a man or a woman, and even the name’s proper pronunciation (Ooo-rie? Yoo-rie?) was left ambiguous too. All is left for the player interpretation.
The one “A-ha!” moment we got from our hands-on time at Comic Fiesta 2016 was a simple problem. Your character couldn’t pass a broken bridge. They will just jump down, and make their way up again until you figured out the solution. Apparently the solution at the time was to drag this one UI element that has pips on the bars- resembling a bridge. To our surprise the character actually managed to cross it, with some hesitation to the beginning.
If DreamTree managed to pull off these moments like this in a lot of the puzzles, we can see something interesting going on here. Uri is intended to be a full-paid app coming to the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store sometime soon.