A soothing audio track plays throughout with realistic rope creaking sounds that add greatly to the overall experience. The game presents some of the best graphics I’ve ever seen on the iPhone.
The objects look very realistic and exhibit high quality texture filtering and glass-smooth animation. The graphics quality of everything onscreen–object, backdrop, rope, and lighting–is superb. (To achieve three flowers requires 99% coverage.)Įach object presented is shown suspended in mid-air in front of a backdrop. It is possible to achieve up to three flowers per object, depending on the percentage of the object that you are able to cover in paint. Each lantern is marked with a number that indicates how many flowers must be acquired in order to light the shapes above it. Selecting a shape symbol brings forth the indicate 3D object to be wrapped with rope. Both routes present the player with a tree that winds its way upwards, adorned with a variety of shape symbols, punctuated by lanterns. The former consists of animal shapes, the latter more basic geometric objects. The game features 51 levels across two different paths: Tree of Reflection and Tree of Challenge. But as Secret Exit suggests, it’s a calm and meditative experience. It sounds like a basic and perhaps bland proposition, frankly. Zen Bound involves wrapping various shapes of stone and wood–blocks, whales, birds, and the like–in a paint-soaked rope in order to, as completely as possible, cover them with paint. But I will go ahead and say it up front: Zen Bound is the most polished and ideally suited game created for the iPhone platform. I usually save the overall assessment until the end of the review. A hard question to answer–until Secret Exit’s Zen Bound made its debut. But of those precious gems, which shone the brightest? Which best utilized the iPhone’s unique combination of controls? That was a hard question to answer.
And while, true, many (most?) aren’t particularly noteworthy, there are some true gems out there. There are currently over 20,000 applications in the iTunes App Store–a large number of them games. We knew then that amazing things were to come… And they have. And my first thoughts? Gaming–and no surprise. And when, a year later, Apple announced the freely available iPhone SDK, it was immediately clear that what we’d seen from the iPhone so far was just the tip of the iceberg. So much cutting edge technology all wrapped up in a multitouch / accelerometer-based package. During those two hours we were exposed to perhaps the most innovative mobile device ever created. When the iPhone was first unveiled by Steve Jobs during the Macworld 2007 keynote, most of the people in attendance stared in slackjawed amazement.
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