Zwirn (the German word for twine) is a puzzle game that is similar to Zen Bound—although instead of entwining wooden objects with rope, you’ll be directing a length so that it comes into contact with various holes and winding it around push pins so that it maintains its shape.

Many puzzles come with more than one way to finish them, and each are connected with a global map accessible by pinching the screen. Indeed, the direction that you approach the next puzzle affects where the starting rope will be. This approach is rather novel, giving the game a wonderful exploratory vibe—if short lived as it contains 25 screens (each screen is a level), four of which explain how to interact with the game.

Interacting with this piece of rope is quite convincing. The muted, multicoloured palette gives it a luxurious appearance and it bends, twists and flexes like a real piece of rope. You’ll grasp the control of it with ease (it simply follows your finger), but even if you get stuck there’s ways to bring it back under your control—touching the starting node pulls it backwards faster (it is persistently moving backwards whilst not connected to the ending node), or you can move the push pins if you get really stuck. To do this, tap on them and tap again to place.

Presentation is solid in places and unconvincing in others. The lack of music—even a soft ambiance would have helped here—is disappointing but the push pins have a great positional audio effect to them that is very noticeable with headphones on. Similarly the backgrounds look gritty and realistic, but there’s no coherency between them. Take a game such as Spider; that had great storytelling without a single line of dialogue, and that was thanks to the many rooms that portrayed a life frozen in time. Without some kind of narrative the game feels a little soulless, random and impersonal.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth experiencing the game, but we think it has a little way to go. We’d be happy enough with a proper soundtrack and some kind of narrative to tie everything together, but as a puzzle that is something different then we’re sure you’ll be happy with Zwirn.

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