CLARC is an isometric puzzle game with fast paced arcade elements that combines a beautiful comic book art style with more than 12 hours of gameplay across 25 levels and more than, “110 grid-based puzzles.”We were fortunate enough to get some hands on time with the game and to sit down with the studios co-founder and lead programmer Matthias Titze.
As you play the first thing you will notice is the games unforgiving nature; CLARC is not difficult to play, but the gameplay is so well designed and so quick to load that failure is never frustrating. Every time you make a mistake the game teaches you a little more about how the game works and what the game wants you to do. Titze confirmed this by saying, “What we don’t like is when games are unfair so we put a lot of effort into designing the puzzles and considering the level of progression. We spent a lot of time tracing it onto paper and we wrote, okay so that is an introductory thing, that’s an advanced thing, that’s a really hard thing.” Titze revealed that in total the game features, “25 levels and something like 110 puzzles,” which is a massive amount of content for a mobile title; especially one of such high quality.
Perhaps the next most striking aspect of the game is the comic book aesthetic which Titze hopes will give the game a longevity not offered with low poly 3D modelling. “Our idea was to create something that’s not aging to quickly so we wanted to find a technique that makes it look a bit more hand drawn and so we developed a set of Photoshop actions to be able to build up textures fairly easily which we could then manipulate to achieve what you see here.”
Titze confirmed that CLARC is coming to both iOS and Android devices and that a port for the Kindle Fire is, “in the works.” I was unable to extract an exact release date, but Titze did say that, “We want to push the button on Friday. We are very confident that the game is finished and ready to go so release should be imminent.” If this is the first you’re hearing about it make sure you check out the trailer embedded below and be sure to add CLARC to your mobile radar for the year 2014!
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