#PGCHelsinki: Tile Tales is in the top five at the Very Big Indie Pitch
A good grout
Tile Tales is a maths game with a stunning art style and an interesting take on the numbers genre. It's a test of your brain power, akin to a scrambled Sudoku or a word search ripped from the pages of an algebra text book.
Actually that might make it sound a bit dull. It's not, it's an ingenious puzzler with a poppy zing to it that's all about drawing lines through digits and symbols.
The aim is to trace a path upwards through a grid, and you're trying to make the biggest number possible.
You start at the bottom, and you can't go back on yourself. Sliding a finger through the tiles adds them together.
Later on there are multiplication tiles, abstract integers that only gain a value when you pass through a different tile.
It's a surprisingly cathartic experience, and it pokes and prods at different aspects of your brain.
You might start a route that feels like it's going to end up with a decent score, only to get stuck with a minus simple and some subtractions half way up.
That adds a level of tactical planning to the experience. It's vaguely chess-like, in that if you're not thinking a few moves ahead, you're unlikely to end up with the best score.
Mixed with the gorgeous aesthetic, the end product is a puzzler that's likely to raise a few eyebrows - in a good way - when it hits the App Store.
