The range of Arcade games on Apple Vision Pro is about to get much better. Tomorrow, three new titles, already on iPhone and iPad, will be available to play: Spire Blast, Gibbon: Beyond The Trees and, oh be still my beating heart, Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City.
If you don’t know them, here’s what they’re all about.
Spire Blast
If you like the idea of a dragon with a querulous face, this game’s for you. Of course, the dragon is just a ruse to draw you in to a puzzle game where you must file color-coded balls at a tower of blocks. Hit the right block with the right ball and the whole thing collapses quickly, hit the wrong block and nothing happens.
Best of all are the carefully constructed physics in the game, meaning that when you land a killer blow, there’s a tantalizing pause while the walls shimmer and wobble before collapsing.
Part of the joy is the noise as the blocks topple, which the Vision Pro should handle nicely. And the glory of blocks tumbling all around you on the immersive Vision Pro display could be fantastic.
Gibbon: Beyond The Trees
Glide through the foliage as gibbons do, with movement based on the dynamic, floating actions real gibbons use in trees. The sumptuously simple hand-painted graphics are breathtaking, and there’s a curious Zen-like feel to playing this game.
This game is immersive on an iPhone SE, so the huge display, as it appears on the Vision Pro’s eyepieces, will make this extraordinary. It’s already touching and engrossing: on the big screen it could be astonishingly compelling.
Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City
Physics are crucial to this game, too, where you sandboard endlessly through changing environments, performing increasingly complex jumps and trips. It’s straightforward to get a handle on how you play, but there’s just the right amount of frustration as you try to grind across rock walls, escape pesky lemurs and bounce on hot air balloons. If that’s not enough, you can even don a wingsuit and fly.
You can tell I’m a fan. There’s something about the way that, when you relax into the mechanics of it, you suddenly find you’ve somersaulted, bounced and rode your sandboard farther than ever. Which is so satisfying.
Really, I’d probably buy an Apple Vision Pro for this game alone. And the good news is that once you have Apple Arcade ($6.99 a month) on one Apple device, it’s there on all of them, including the Vision Pro. Not all games are compatible with all platforms, which is why today’s news is so great.