GAME OF THE DAY

Expect the unexpected

Ingenious puzzle game Song Of Bloom takes you to surprising places.

Song of Bloom

A Story in Pieces

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It all begins with a strange monologue about seeing signs and symbols everywhere. And just like you, the game’s narrator is poking at his phone, trying to make sense of it all.

Song of Bloom is a series of interconnected puzzles that branch out – quite literally – from the disembodied twig on the title screen. And you never really know where you’ll end up.

The jumps from scene to scene in this game are wild, but they’re all cleverly connected through common shapes and symbols.

The art style and the type of puzzle differs wildly depending on which path you head down. There’s jelly to wobble, corn to pop, Mondrian-inspired art to tinker with and there’s even a snowglobe to shake about, made of the kind of chunky wool your nan uses for knitting.

You don’t just tap and swipe – inventive use of your iPhone and iPad’s capabilities means you’ll solve puzzles in some pretty unexpected ways.

Within each scene, you’ll notice signs and symbols that appear in that opening monologue, which you’ll return to again and again armed with more intel. Then with a tap or swipe in the right place, you trigger further new puzzles.

And on you go, discovering new secrets in familiar scenes, over and over again. It’s ingenious stuff, and it requires a keen sense of experimentation; some puzzles require more than a mere tap or swipe of the screen to be solved.

Deconstruct this Mondrian-inspired piece and you’ll be rewarded with a cheeky nod to Banksy in a later scene.

Song of Bloom is an inventive, stylish and thoroughly satisfying series of riddles that tests your lateral thinking as much as it pleases the eye. It’s another must-download game from indie auteur Philipp Stollenmayer.