A quantum twist on the classic sliding puzzle, in holographic 3D.
Erwin is a premium puzzle game played on the surface of a 3D cube.
One purchase for iPhone, iPad and Mac. No ads, no in-app purchases.
If you’re familiar with the classics, Threes! or 2048, you already know the basics. You’ll just have to start thinking in more dimensions.
The game shows a 3D cube - similar to a Rubik’s Cube - floating in front of a dark background, each of its six faces is a four-by-four grid. Tiles sit in the grid’s cells, marked with colors and different shapes indicating their value.
Tiles can slide across the active, front-facing side of the cube.
Matching tiles merge into one, and after each move, new tiles appear in random empty cells. Tile values start at 2 and double with each merge: 4, 8, 16, and 32.
Each merge adds the new tile’s value to your score. The highest valued tiles don’t merge, and the cube slowly fills up.
The game ends when the cube is full and no more moves are possible. The goal is to reach the highest score you can.
This is the part that makes Erwin different. The game board isn’t flat: it’s a cube that can turn, and with a swipe on the empty space around it, the cube reveals its other sides.
The tiles along the edges and corners belong to more than one side at once, and can move on any side they touch. After a few games, you’ll start planning around the corners.
Play long enough, and quantum effects begin to appear. You don’t need to know any physics for this, and the effects emerge gradually as you play. The first time you meet one, the game pauses to explain how it works, both in the game and in real quantum physics.
Superposition: a newly spawned tile can have two values at once, and collapses to a single value on the next move that touches it, to whichever value produces a merge with a neighbor if one is possible.
Entangled tiles: a linked pair that moves together. When one of them merges, both disappear and add their values to your score.
Teleportation: every now and then, a tile gets a green glow. Press and hold, let go, and it jumps to an empty cell on the cube.
How can you experience a three-dimensional environment without special glasses or expensive gear, just by looking at the screen? As it turns out, holograms do just that.
I’ve been experimenting with 3D on Apple’s devices for years, and Erwin is where all of it ended up.
On the Mac you can turn on holographic mode, and the cube follows the position of your head through the camera.
On the other hand, when you tilt your iPhone or iPad, it shifts in depth like a hologram, and you can almost look around its corners.
Using head tracking and forced perspective to create depth isn’t new, of course, and I salute the pioneers like Johnny Lee and Bot&Dolly. Thank you for the inspiration.
Up to four players can play together through Game Center. You can invite your friends, or join a quick match with other players. Erwin’s multiplayer mode is cooperative, non-competitive: you take turns, one swipe each, and there’s no timer, so nobody has to rush.
If you are signed in to Game Center Erwin posts your high score to the global single-player or multiplayer leaderboard.
Erwin’s Game Center achievements celebrate your high points, exploration, and first encounters in the game.
Erwin runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and one Universal purchase covers all three. With Family Sharing, up to five family members can play too.
As of version 1.4, Erwin supports game controllers with the standard extended gamepad layout. Tested with a PlayStation 5 DualSense controller on iPad, iPhone, and Mac, but any two-stick controller in this class is expected to work.
Erwin incorporates many of Apple’s accessibility features that come with every iPhone, iPad and Mac.
When I designed Erwin’s multiplayer mode my guiding principle was that everyone - sighted players and VoiceOver users - joins the same match; there is no separate "accessible mode." There is no countdown timer, and no player is forced to maintain a specific pace, thinking time is free.
This is an app I wanted for myself, without compromise or dark patterns. It’s ad-free, tracking-free, so you can enjoy your game without interruptions.
Decidedly minimalist - what is absent (load screen, analytics, nagging in-app purchases, notifications, etc) is as intentional as what is present: "a thousand no’s" to protect the experience against the dark patterns of the attention economy.
I’ve built Erwin entirely with Apple’s native frameworks, which means no third-party SDK baggage, the app size is less than 50 MB.
A single-player Erwin game requires no internet connection, you can play whether you are on a subway, or over the Atlantic.