Hello again, friends. There’s a global disaster unfolding but the good news is we’re still here and we have something new to share with you. While Riccardo and I have been cooped up in our respective lockdown boltholes navigating the challenges of remote collaboration, we’ve somehow managed to cobble together a free-to-play word puzzle game for your entertainment – and it even works.
Clambers is a minimalist brain-teaser for iPhone and iPad in which the aim is to decipher scrambled words in the shortest possible time. You can play solo at your own pace for meditative purposes or compete with Game Centre friends and random opponents in quick-fire, turn-based contests. And that’s pretty much it.
2020, though, right? Yeah. Whatever interdimensional Lovecraftian chaos monster has been toying with us all for the past few years is laying it on a bit thick now. A significant part of the struggle to maintain good mental health in an intense weirdocalypse is not knowing what to do with oneself during prolonged periods of enforced downtime in isolation. If sometimes it all gets a bit too much to handle and you’re bouncing off the walls, an occasional distraction to occupy the mind and keep it narrowly focused on a simple task may be just the ticket. We think our latest offering could help calm those of you searching for a temporary reprieve from doomscrolling, even if only for a little while.
Maybe cabin fever is flooding your cerebral cortex with intrusive fight-or-flight impulses. Maybe you’ve run out of Friends episodes to rewatch. Maybe you’re standing, masked-up, in a winding queue a quarter of a mile long to get into a supermarket so you can stock up on rice and TP. We’ve found that Clambers can come to the rescue in such desperate scenarios. Dip into it when you need something – anything – to stave off boredom, take your mind off your worries or satisfy a craving for a quick win. The serotonin hit and quiet sense of achievement to be enjoyed from rearranging ODRMESFE into FREEDOMS one letter at a time, 4 seconds faster than xXM3gam0ose99Xx managed to do it may surprise you. Also, if you’re anything like us, you’ll find that methodically dragging jumbled tiles to spell out words in a low-pressure competition with yourself can have an oddly soothing, therapeutic effect.
Clambers is absolutely free to download and play and there are no advertisements. We do live in a relentless, ultra-capitalist hellscape though, and we’ve got to eat. Hopefully, you won’t mind that we’ve included a few optional in-app purchases like hints, extra languages and unlockable levels for anyone who wants to kick things up a notch. Why not dive in and give it your best shot – we hope to bump into you in the leaderboards.
Keep well and stay safe out there!