DEVICE 6

As an Android user, it’s taken me years to play the iOS-exclusive DEVICE 6, because there’s no way I’d pay hundreds of dollars to play a single game. Then again, if there’s any iOS game that would be worth it, this one might be it. It exists in a totally unique intersection of text and graphic adventure where the narration itself is stretched and warped to form the level layout. The aesthetic of 60s spy fiction is interspersed with the text to form an eerie, mesmerizing world whose balance of surrealism and metaphor is constantly being called into question. Fittingly, the narrative it supports is a paranoia-inducing tale of agency as it relates to technology – one that adeptly blurs the line between player and player character. The gameplay is puzzle-focused, unsurprisingly, but those puzzles occupy a perfect sweet spot where challenge is concerned. The only complaints I have are that the six chapters follow a very similar pattern, and the increasingly bizarre interludes between them serve little purpose aside from opaque foreshadowing.