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.

(game 6 of me going through this list by selecting games at random)

Pretty stylish but really unintuitive and just generally not a very good puzzle game. It's often impossible to know what the player character will do on any given frame without trial and error (will they go down the stairs or continue past them? will they go up or down the ladder? etc), and sometimes you can't even tell what order the panels will be in (particularly an issue once panels can start rotating).

Functionally, it's just kind of a worse Gorogoa. I wonder if this inspired that, given this came out a couple years before. Having the "panels" be more temporal rather than physical (if that makes any sense) does lead to it being a fair bit more confusing and less intuitive as a puzzle game. Doesn't help that a good 70% of the puzzles are dead easy, about 15% are at a proper difficulty, and 15% are just hard as balls for no reason, not as a result of a gradual difficulty curve, but just kinda placed randomly throughout the game.

Still a neat concept, and it wasn't particularly long, so I'll probably check out the sequel anyways.

I’m skeptical of slick, stylish videogames. The style often feels like a cover-up, a compensation for some lack. Even when it’s not, it can put me off. I want warm, not cool.

Here we have the fascinating grammar of comics – the lines, the gutters, the unfolding of space as time – confused with film cuts and reduced to sequence. And rudimentary sequence at that. Up-down, left-right, right-wrong. But stylish as shit.

Framed’s simple logic puzzles remind me of those I used to find at the backs of magazines in the dentist’s waiting room. In other words: not the future of videogames.