Eliss - trailer on Vimeo (via Vimeo)

I bought this game last night on my iPhone. It’s something special.

The above trailer does a good job of showing how you use multi-touch to split and join circles of the same color. This kind of multi-touch mechanic isn’t currently possible on any other platform other than the iPhone.

The trailer also does a good job of showing you that you need to keep the different color “planets” apart, and that your goal is to drag these planets of the appropriate size and color into “squeesars” to make them disappear and produce health restoring “stardust”. Oh yeah and it also shows the gravity vortexes that pull your planets in.

What the trailer doesn’t show is how punishing this game is when your planets of different colors collide. This makes the game extremely challenging (particularly when there is a vortex on screen). I found that as the incresingly challenging levels progressed I had to use both hands, and often multiple fingers from each hand to keep the planets apart. Thus the game was not only mentally challenging in the “I don’t think I’ve ever had to use my brain in this way before” kind of way that games like Portal and Braid made me feel, but it was also a challenge of manual dexterity.

Oh yeah, and I like it’s old-school aliased computer graphics look too.