Lunch Bug is a beautifully presented and strangely addictive strategy puzzle game. It plays similar to the classic board game Othello mixed with the upgrade mechanic of Triple Town. Each turn you are given a new piece to place onto the board. Create chains of berries and the bugs will scamper in and eat them, place two larger berries at each end of a row of small berries and they’ll all increase to the next size up. It’s tricky to explain, but the tutorial does a good job of leading you through.
Created by Geoff Blair and Matt Hackett, collectively known as Lost Decade Games, they have done a stellar job of making this game run on pretty much everything. Play it on a lowly iPhone 3 and it still works, audio and all. Load it up on an iPad and it reflows the layout so that the status bars are down the side instead of across the top and the whole thing just looks bigger and cleaner. There are even Chrome Web Store and Pokki versions to play offline.
Right now it’s fair to say that the majority of HTML5 games are very device specific. Either they target mobile browsers and cater for the lowest common denominator devices, often excluding audio entirely and keep the ‘action’ to a minimum. Or they target modern desktop browsers with all guns blazing in a hail of WebGL awesomeness, and then fall over dead when launched on a mobile. It’s great to see that Lost Decade Games chose to embrace the variety and not lock themselves away into a segment of it.
So whatever device you pick to play Lunch Bug on, you can enjoy its adorable sound effects, 20 increasingly difficult levels, unlockable endless mode and ubiquitous in-game store, no matter what – and long may this trend continue. You can follow Lost Decade Games on twitter and I strongly recommend subscribing to their html5 gaming podcast.