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Blocked is about as simple as you can get. You have a blue block, you have a hole in the wall, and you have numerous grey blocks to move out of the way. Sounds easy enough, right?
You have a confined space to move blocks around in with the touch screen, and one exit for the blue block to find its way through. This is an easy enough task for the first few dozen levels once you’re familiar with the conventions for solving the puzzles. Soon enough, though, you’ll find yourself with less and less space to move around in and the challenge becomes much harder.
The game is such that you can pay as much or as little attention to what you’re doing as you want to, and still achieve something – either randomly moving blocks to whatever space happens to be open, or giving it a bit more consideration and thinking about your moves in advance. You progress by completing every level at a difficulty setting to unlock the next highest difficulty. This can cause problems if you are stuck on a couple of the last levels as you cannot simply jump to the next difficulty and play new levels. The other side of the coin is that it encourages you to think about the levels more, which becomes more important in later difficulties. It would have been a better idea, perhaps, to only require a percentage of levels to be completed for each difficulty to progress onto the next.
Simplicity works heavily in Blocked’s favour and it’s crucial to the success of pick-up-and-play games of this nature. There might be cause for concern that, in aid of retaining simplicity, there is little depth to the game. An added time trial mode may have contributed some longevity, but features like this could have raised Blocked’s tiny, impulse buy, 59p price tag.
