Blek is a 2013 puzzle video game for iOS and Android by Kunabi Brother, a team of brothers Denis and Davor Mikan. The player draws a snakelike black line that recurs in pattern and velocity across the screen to remove colored dots and avoid black dots. It is minimalist in design, features excerpts of Erin Gee, and takes inspiration from Golan Levin, the Bauhaus, and Japanese calligraphy. The brothers designed the game as a touchscreen adaptation to classic game Snake and worked on the game for over six months. It was released in December 2013 for iPad, and was later released for other iOS devices and Android. The game received positive reviews, and critics praised the game's degree of unrestricted play. The game reached the top of the Apple App Store charts several months after its release. It received a 2014 Apple Design Award, and has sold over one million copies.
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For starters: Blek is a puzzle game with a mechanic that could only really be done on a touchscreen: the exact motion of the line you draw out is repeated over and over, and the goal is to use that repetition to collect pellets in the level while avoiding obstacles. It's so simple and so well suited to a touchscreen, and it makes a genuinely great mobile puzzle game on its own.
Now the magical bit: the game is broken. Some of the levels don't display properly on modern screens, which occasionally makes the intended solution impossible. For example, in the hint for level 60, there is an indicator suggesting you draw a portal - which is something you can do btw, game never lets you know that outside of hints lol - draw the portal OUTSIDE of the screen. You can just see the edge of the indicator.
Now with some games, this breaks them. In our screen filled hellscape I think everyone has experienced something only partially displaying onscreen, making it untouchable. But miraculously, for Blek, this invites for some truly clever innovation. If you look up Level 60 solutions on YouTube (like I did once hitting this roadblock), you will find tons of different approaches: reversing the motion of the line by bouncing off the wall, then entering the portal, drawing an extra long portion to reach over to where the portal would have come out, some strange worm-thing that inches back and forth, deftly wrapping around obstacles. It's BEAUTIFUL. And sometimes this happens naturally in the game, and the game is totally cool with it. To see it happen mistakenly and have players to overcome the odds and come up with new approaches, that's magical. It's so uncommon for a puzzle game to allow for this much variety in solutions and it's wonderfully refreshing. This game doesn't feel a day old.
So Blek devs, please never fix your game, I love it as it is.