Okay, I just wrote about this in my 12 Promising Mobile Games feature, but I've played Sola Rola quite a bit over the weekend and really think it's one of the most polished and interesting original mobile titles I've seen. Developed by denmark's Progressive Media, it's a cute platformer which uses lots of physics elements to challenge the rolling, blobby lead characters. Yeah, I thought LocoRoco too, but it's more intriguing than a basic rip-off.
I spoke to Progressive's CEO Thomas Nielsen about the ideas behind the game. he told me:
"We can't blame people for thinking LocoRoco when they see SolaRola. There are some obvious visual similarities. But the truth is, the visual similarities are there because mobile phones draw solid boxes and circles really well, and we wanted to use that for some neat tricks.
"For this game, and most of everything else we do actually, we've tried more to look at what Nintendo does in all their games. Making games easy to understand and easily accessible to anyone is something the company does incredibly well, and something we believe is very important. You shouldn't have to spend a lot of time figuring out what a game is about and how to play it; that needs to be immediately intuitive, because most people think playing games is a whole lot more fun than figuring out how to control your character or interpret strange on-screen information. SolaRola uses only 3 buttons and has no on-screen information, and we think that's crucial in making games accessible and fun, especially on mobile phones."
Sola Rola cleverly plays with the conventions of mobile games. The menu screen is presented as a sort of hub/home world, rather than a boring list so you're immediately thrust into the game space. A little thing, but effective. From here, the levels are beautifully designed, with lots of brain-work, exploration and nimble movement required to get your blobs through the landscape in one piece.
Anyway, I promised that if any of the developers could provide demos of their games, I'd provide a link for our readers. So here you'll find a demo of Sola Rola. Give it a shot.
