Culture

It’s a melancholy thing to ruminate on these sub two-dollar iPod touch games, to glimpse a vertical slice of a dystopian world in which we all must eternally run to the right with no respite until we inevitably tumble into the ink. In The Blocks Cometh, you instead jump upwards and because the vertical climb has connotations of leading towards something better, the depression is even more sharply focused. Any hopes we might have held are dashed, almost immediately, as we are crushed beneath a falling crate, holding a score so abysmally low as to deny us even s sense of achievement.
You’re not in the Mushroom Kingdom any more, fat, moustachioed plumber-Dorothy.
So rarely do these games have anything as quaint as levels, or an ending. Canabalt, Doodle Jump, even Robot Unicorn Attack (highly recommended); it’s all the same.  You begin, much like the final Russell T Davies Doctor Who episodes, all but certain that your life will come to an end. But unlike the tenth Doctor, who dies proudly in a tumultuous and emotional confrontation with John Simm and Timothy Dalton and regenerates into a series headed by the guy who penned The Empty Child, and Blink, your character will fall in a way so mundane, so unambiguous, so void of tumult or passion that you will hardly notice, and you will start again, reflexively, to give yet another pixelated nobody a run at the top that never comes. What a metaphor. 
Mechanically, The Blocks Cometh is as simple as an iPod touch/iPhone game should be, as simple as our office jobs, our arbitrary social conventions, and our bachelor degrees. Standing in the midst of what feels like a twisted, industrial game of Tetris, the goal is simply to climb as high as you can without being crushed between a pair of crates. Your height is your score. 
Unlike Doodle Jump, which was a perfect fit for the iPhone format, taking advantage of its tilt control to manoeuvre your character, Blocks has needed a little squeezing by the shameless corporate behemoth to get it to function. The option for tilt control exists, but it’s not precise enough, so most players will prefer to use the directional buttons superimposed onto the screen. With the A and B buttons already hogging real estate (for shooting blocks and jumping), the lower half of the screen can quickly get crowded by too many thumbs. 
Thankfully, like the best iPod touch titles, the game’s simple controls lend themselves to a variety of strategies. Sliding and wall jumping combine with regular jumps to give a real skill set to master, and techniques will quickly be developed if you can cope with the punishing difficulty. Blocks is a perfect game to pick up for thirty seconds as you are assaulted by advertising designed to manipulate you, or surrounded by spluttering, emphysemic  commuters on the soulless bus ride to your dead end job.
The Blocks Cometh might be the new king of the addictive, existential crisis inducing iPod touch/iPhone games. It has a pixel art style to rival Canabalt which makes you wonder whether you’re at war with Eurasia or Eastasia, and gameplay that is more rewarding in its nuance and complexity, if less intrinsically fun, than Doodle Jump. At $0.99 US from the iTunes store it’s a brilliant deal, even if it does bring the futility of your existence into terrifying focus. Because as we all know, if there ever was a heaven it’s long since been clogged full of high-fructose corn syrup and Scrumpy.
 3/5