Hyperspace Yard, A new Finnish game studio just put out their first title, dubbed Division Cell today on the App Store and on Google Play. The game offers fresh puzzle dynamics wrapped up in a smooth packaging of visuals, music, and narration to get players through sometimes complicated puzzles.
The gameplay revolves around tapping aymmetric polygons to expand or shrink their borders in order to create all equal sized shapes, or “create harmony” as the game calls it. For instance in the screenshot to the left, if you were to tap a polygon, it would expand on the borders with the white buttons. If the buttons were black, however, that face of the polygon would contract. You tap around against the clock and a move tracker until you get equal sized shapes to win some some stars. An HTML version of the game can be found here, to get hands on with the dynamics.
Testing out the game I can say you’ll go through a range of emotions anywhere from “I am a genius,” to “this game is the worst,” to “wow, I have no idea what I did there, but cool.” The expanding range of polygons, from simple rectangles, to more complicated triangels, to even Spheres gives the game good replay value with 140 Puzzle Mode levels. If that isn’t enough, two other game modes are procedurally generated.
Division Cell is a premium game launched for $1.99 on both platforms.
Behind the game are Production Designer Visa-Valtteri Pimiä, who has previously worked for companies such as Sony, Remedy and Mr. Goodliving. Hyperspace Yard’s Lead Developer is Evgeni Gordejev, who is known for creating a physics based puzzle game Tupsu. The third founder, Marketing Specialist Jari Jaanto is also one of the creators of the Finnish social networking site IRC-Galleria and co-founder of the company behind the real time communication tool Ninchat.
“The idea of Division Cell first sprang from the fundamental human need to arrange things symmetrically”,Gordejev, explains. “After finishing the prototype in February 2013, we recognized this is an idea which should be developed into a fully functional game”.
“When I first saw the early version of the game, I immediately recognized the potential of its simplicity and design. Previously I’ve developed mostly action arcade games, so Division Cell seemed like a great opportunity to do something fresh and completely different on our own terms”, Pimiä adds.
The game can be found on iOS, and Google Play.
