Framed

released on Nov 13, 2014

Framed is a puzzle game by Loveshack Entertainment.


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Starts kind of “meh too much trial and error” but it gets REALLY good towards the end. This is a super fun and sometimes quite challenging puzzle game with a rather colorful noir aesthetic.

we used to get these charming little mobile games before subscriptions and microtransactions completely destroyed the incentives to be creative i hate appstore sm

Простенькая головоломка с классным концептом повествования через фреймы комикса и выставления этих фреймов в правильном порядке. Головоломки не только об очерёдности действий персонажей, но и пространственные. Стильно и действительно цепляюще сюжетно.

FRAMED is a duology of mobile games that follows a duo of accomplices on the run, fleeing from the police and other pursuers. It's a puzzle game where each stage is laid out as a series of panels, as in a comic book. When the stage begins, the panels are laid out in a way that will inevitably result in your character's capture or death -- your job is to rearrange the panels in a way that they make it safely to the last panel.

You can influence the outcome by using whatever stage elements are present on each panel. If your character leaves a panel from the right, they'll come in from the left in the next, however, if there's a door in their path, they'll opt to go through it, and then enter the next panel from a similar door. If there's a ladder, they'll climb it; if there's an item, they'll take it with them into the following panels.

FRAMED's puzzles elegantly play off comics logic and our understanding of continuity in visual storytelling. They do so while instigating your curiosity, beckoning you to discover what would happen in X or Y arrangement of panels. I've seen people frame the puzzles as trial-and-error and unintuitive, and, well, there's some truth to the former point, but experimenting a couple of times with the stage elements to figure out what they do is part of the fun in the game, as there's always a consistent underlying logic behind how they work. The fact that you have to tinker with each panel a bit only makes the final solution more satisfying.

Besides, it's hard to say that the game drags: it features bite-sized stages, totals only a couple of hours, and each run through a stage flies by before you notice, as the phenomenal animation work and sound design make it easy to lose yourself in the action. It's one of those games that you do not want to play without headphones on. These are apps I've had installed on my phone for years -- they're great for burning half an hour every now and then while putting the brain to work.

Stylish but the gameplay is basic.