Hands-on with Avoid It

Trawling through the halls of G-Star, Korea's massive video game trade show, is a disorienting experience for a western gamer.

While there are plenty of familiar brands and companies vying for your eyeballs, there's also wealth of local, independent talent that's easy to miss in the blinding light cast by Blizzard, Wargaming.net, Kakao, and Nintendo.

One such talent, Studio RO, caught our eye with its one-touch game Avoid it.

To say that it borrows its visual aesthetic from Badland and World of Goo would be something of an understatement, but the gameplay Avoid It helps it stand out as a game of its own.

In Avoid It, you control a bouncing black blob (yes yes, Badland again...) which you propel upwards through a series of taps.

A quick tap lets you jump from one side of the screen to the other, holding your finger on the screen initiates a slow-motion slide down the side you're currently on, and lifting your finger from the screen sends your ball into an uncontrolled roll.

Your overall goal in Avoid It is to go upwards for as long as you can, while - you guessed it - avoiding "it".

In most levels, the "it" is a giant fuse in the middle of the screen that's burning down towards the bottom, but in boss levels the "it" becomes a flailing mass of monster tentacles that's substantially more difficult to avoid.

Intriguingly and pleasingly, Avoid It offers randomly generated level design that helps the gameplay stay fresh and challenging even when you've got avoiding it down to a science.

Make no mistake - Avoid It isn't an incredibly rich or deep game. It isn't Oceanhorn, Bastion, or The Room, but it looks like a great little timewaster that'll compete with some of the more casual, one-finger games on the market.

And best of all, it's a game that none of your friends will likely have heard of - which makes it a great way to earn some iOS hipster gamer cred.

We don't know too much about Avoid It other than what we experienced in the beta build, but we've been told that it'll support a free-to-play model (stand alone app, with additional levels available for purchase) and that it'll launch globally for iOS this coming January.

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