Tile Family Adventure, published by Catbyte and backed by LOUD Ventures, belongs to one of the most misunderstood genres on mobile.
A glance at the screenshots will tell you that this is a colorful, polished puzzler featuring tiles decorated with cartoon symbols. On that basis, you might assume it’s just another Candy Crush clone and move on.
But download Tile Family Adventure and you’ll find it’s anything but.
Before we explain why, let’s just get something else out of the way. Casual puzzlers may be accessible and universal, but that doesn’t make them trivial.
Not every game has to educate and alarm you. It’s not necessary for your blood pressure to rise to know that you’re having a good time. Deep, complex strategy games, fast-paced arcade shooters, and blistering racers are all great—but tranquillity is just as important.
Download Tile Family Adventure and you’ll find a zen experience, with serene, beautifully illustrated backdrops, soothing music, gentle sound effects, and absolutely no timers.
It has the meditative quality of tidying up, as you calmly and methodically solve its countless puzzle stages (by countless, we mean hundreds, with more being added to the game on a regular basis).
Modern life is overwhelming and exciting. Sometimes you need the sort of sanctuary that only a well-made mobile puzzler can provide.
But why should you download Tile Family Adventure for free in particular?
In short, it’s not like anything else—or, at least, it’s not like the vast, vast majority of other mobile puzzlers.
While it’s almost compulsory these days for developers to rip stick to the same tired old Candy Crush blueprint, Tile Family Adventure goes further afield for its inspiration, all the way to the land of mahjong.
Your goal in Tile Family Adventure is to clear a stack of tiles by matching them. This involves tapping on a tile to remove it to a rack with seven spaces, and then tapping two more of the same design to make them vanish.
Tiles are cleared from the rack and not the stack, so you always need to make sure there are enough spaces to make three of a kind (don’t worry, they don’t have to be touching). Every stage is winnable, but only if you take your time and concentrate.
While the first few stages in Tile Family Adventure are deceptively simple, the challenge quickly ramps up. Eventually the game forces you to deal with frozen tiles, sticky tiles, surprise tiles too, upping the ante even further.
On the flip side, you’re armed with a few special moves of your own, with an array of power-ups allowing you to get a hint, an extra place on the tile rack, a full shuffle, an undo, and so on.
These power-ups are consumable—the game would be too easy otherwise—but you can buy more with the coins that you earn by completing levels.
If you’re feeling flush, you can buy coins through in-app purchases, and spend them not only on replenishing your power-up supply but also extending your turn when you run out of moves or buying more lives to play for longer.
Or not. You can download Tile Family Adventure for free, with no intrusive interstitial ads, so you can play it as much as you like without spending a penny.
However you choose to play, you’ll never run out of stuff to do. Tile Family Adventure has an absolutely huge number of levels, soaring well into the hundreds, and new stages are being added all the time.
For all these reasons and more, we reckon Tile Family Adventure is the ideal way to enjoy a zone out while giving yourself a challenge.
Download Tile Family Adventure for free right now.