Oceanhorn, a "Zelda-inspired" iOS game →

There are a few things I find particularly interesting about this project. It's being developed by the same people who made Death Rally which is a game that, I must admit, had me hooked for a good couple of days until I completed it. The artwork and details they've released so far make it clear that the game was inspired by The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and it sounds like the team is determined to bring that kind of high-quality adventure to iOS.

From their blog:

Why are we making a retro-adventure game for today's market? We just loved those games back in the day and we feel like action adventure genre should take a look back and learn something from its past.... There are still games that value these traditions, especially one very big game series we all love, but other than that the evolution of console style adventure games has grown thin, or stopped even.

One of the most important aspects of Oceanhorn is a 3D tile map editor, called "OCEAN: Tile-Based Worlds"... a fun and efficient world editor that can be used for all our upcoming games. Editor is still work in progress and it will be developed at the same time with Oceanhorn. It runs on iPad, so we can immediately test controls and gameplay in the maps we create. Because of the 3D tile map approach, we can efficiently create lots of level content with a small team.

I've been wondering when somebody would try to bring a more "traditional" DS-style or PSP-style game to iOS, and this might be the first one (arguably) to do that. By "traditional" I mean the kind of deep game you'd feel compelled to play for weeks or longer. Something like Pokemon; the ridiculously popular (and time-consuming) game series that got its start on the Game Boy, a machine extraordinarily less powerful than what we're all carrying in our pockets today. Infinity Blade is a good game and looks great, but honestly, it's nowhere near as popular as Pokemon or Zelda or Mario. It's pretty, but it doesn't last long enough as these gaming greats.

I'm really rooting for these guys. I hope that lightning strikes and they (or somebody) kicks off a new post-Angry Birds generation of popular, well-made and deep games that put iOS gaming on equal footing with the DS or PSP. The iPhone hardware is more than capable of supporting the next big game with Pokemon-like success, I just haven't seen anybody build it yet. Let's start seeing some $10+ games that can suck in "core gamers" for hours at a time like the DS or PSP can. Once somebody kicks this off, similar games will follow, and eventually Nintendo and Sony will feel much more comfortable bringing their triple-A franchises to these platforms.