Cube & Star: An Arbitrary Love has made its way to the iPad after successfully rolling its colorful way across Steam.
There is a type of game that aims not to provide users with an extreme challenge, or deep storyline, or even overtly engaging gameplay. These are the games that seek, instead, to invoke in their players a sense of atmosphere or emotion abstracted away from the boundaries established by linear or goal-oriented design. This is the type of game Cube & Star: An Arbitrary Love sets out to be.
Developed and published by Doppler Interactive, Cube & Star is a freeform exploration game based around cubes. Rolling, colorful cubes in rainbow pigments, that is, on a journey to reshape and recolor the world around them. Goals are limited and far less important than the mere act of playing, with the player’s actions shaping the world in what ever way they want.
The game released on Steam for PC, Mac, and Linux earlier this year, and this month has become available on the iPad, giving gamers on the go a chance to explore the game’s open, geometric worlds wherever they go — provided they’re an Apple junkie, of course. There’s even a trailer available, if you prefer to see your mobile games in action before picking them up.
On his reasoning behind releasing Cube & Star on the iPad, the game’s designer Joshua McGrath had a few words to say:
On bringing Cube & Star: An Arbitrary Love to the largely casual App Store McGrath comments “I think it’s a unique addition to the whole App Store… ecosystem. These touch devices are beautiful things, and they’re a little underutilized right now, I think. The App Store is big and loud – but man… it could be big and loud and meaningful – right?”
Meaningful games? Meaningful mobile games? Most certainly a noble idea, at the least.
Cube & Star is the work of a very small Indie development team based out of Sydney, Australia, and is their first major commercial release. Their past work has included smaller, equally concept-driven titles, as well as development tools for the Unity game engine, which was also used to produce Cube & Star. The iPad release for the title is the second step in the company’s long-term plans for the game, with their next goal being to bring Cube & Star to the Wii U.