Told through its lush, painted style, the story of Bryce Manor is never made explicit. Hunting through the clues left behind as a small spider, there's a lot that you can discover through the cracks and intricacies of the old home. Tying all the various imagery together, you can create a semblance of a mystery that then is covered over by thin wisps of spider's silk. This is a game meant to be experienced, and happily it plays as well as it looks.

You navigate around the environment entirely with touch gestures - tap on the screen to move there, and flick it to jump. Tapping on the spider activates the thread, which is spun on the next jump. Of course, there's a limit to how much you can spin in a single jump, and when you do hit the limit your thread snaps and is reimbursed to your thread count. There's some occasional issues where you find yourself stuck and unable to move whilst trying to spin a thread, but apart from those rare occurrences control nears perfection.

It almost feels like you are watching the whole thing unfold behind a pane of glass, but that's not necessarily far from the truth.

Once you've created enough thread to make a polygon (at least three sides) it will be autofilled with programmatically generated cobweb that turns into a trap for the assorted bluebottles, flies and bugs that roam the abandoned rooms. Each one eaten contributes to your thread count so that you can spin more, and chaining bugs together will earn you a big score reward. If you lose all of your thread, you will be given a 'last chance' to eat something before you die, so try and keep some thread in hand.

Interestingly, many bugs need different techniques to take them out. Most can be trapped on the web, but some can break free, whilst others you can pounce on and slam to a hard surface to kill them. And whilst most fly on a fixed path there's tricky moths that will land just out of reach of your web, or dragonflies that hover around, waiting for you to come and get them. Furthermore, many of the rooms have secrets to discover that will land you yet more bugs and possibly hints about past events. What can you piece together of the plot from the 28 scenes that you are presented with? We don't want to wreck the fun of it, but suffice to say the game opens up many questions and real, almost lifelike scenarios frozen in time. It almost feels like you are watching the whole thing unfold behind a pane of glass, but that's not necessarily far from the truth.

The touch controls feel great, and playing through an arachnid's perspective lends a lot to the experience.

Getting through the Adventure mode shouldn't take more than a couple of hours, as the completion requirements aren't especially taxing. If you choose to clear each room of bugs then you will be spending more time on it, but it's essentially a short game. Extending the life of the game comes the alternate modes, including a harder variant of the main campaign, a survival mode and a 3 minute rush mode. All the modes comes with online leader boards, and the game also features achievements and a healthy amount of statistic tracking.

It's the presentation however which is the true draw. The clever spider styled keyhole design of the game's icon matches the detailed, incredibly realistic rooms of Bryce Manor - nothing seems out of place and yet there is a soft disarray underneath, something which you, of course, are a contributor to. The tone of the music at its best reflects perfectly of the atmosphere, though we can't help but feel something with a darker tone to it would fit better with the game. As you can substitute your own music, this won't prove to be an issue. The rest of the sound design though is superb.

Hesitate to buy Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor and you could be missing out on one of the App Store's hidden gems. The touch controls feel great, and playing through an arachnid's perspective lends a lot to the experience. Even if you only play through the adventure and ignore the rest of the modes, this title is superb value and one that must be bought. Even though save game is limited to the beginning of the level, overall the game is a masterpiece of craftsmanship, and one that we feel wouldn't be the same on any other platform.

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