1167: How NimbleBit Finally Nailed It

If you own a modern mobile phone or tablet, chances are you’ve encountered NimbleBit’s games at least once, most likely in the form of their runaway success Tiny Tower.

Lest you’re one of the few people out there who never played Tiny Tower, let me explain: you run a tower block, presented in Commodore 64-style low-resolution pixel art. In order to progress in the game, you must continue to purchase and build new floors onto your tower, which can be assigned as residential or commercial properties. Residential properties hold, well, residents, while commercial properties must be staffed with residents and can then generate money for you even when you’re not actively playing the game. However, there’s a limit to how much money they can make, since each commercial establishment only has a limited amount of stock for each of the three items they sell, and when it runs out, you need to manually restock it by tapping on it.

Essentially, that was pretty much all there was to the gameplay. You booted it up, you tapped on a few things, you marvelled at how much money you’d “earned,” you felt a bit depressed that the amount you’d earned was less than a tenth of what the next floor costs, you closed the app only to repeat the process a few hours later. In terms of complexity it was little more than FarmVille, and the early comparisons to SimTower it attracted were most certainly not justified in the slightest.

Tiny Tower was a free-to-play game. That means it was free to download but you could purchase things with real money. For the most part, this took the form of “Bux”, a premium currency that allowed you to bypass anything in the game that would normally take a long period of non-interactive real time to complete, such as building a new floor. The game was fairly generous about giving out Bux for free, but it was still essentially a “pay to win” experience, whereby the more money you paid in, the faster progress you made. Exactly the same was true for Tiny Tower’s follow-up Pocket Planes, which adopted the exact same faux-retro aesthetic and was just as devoid of meaningful decision-making as Tiny Tower was.

NimbleBit are back with a new game. It’s still self-consciously retro in terms of both gameplay and presentation, but in terms of being a quality experience it’s a huge jump over the company’s past work. Nimble Quest is a curious combination of Snake and Gauntlet, it’s free-to-play, and it’s fabulous.

In Nimble Quest, you select one of a number of unlockable heroes to start the game and then proceed to use that hero’s style of attacking to defeat enemies. Different heroes have different styles of attacking — some are melee, some are ranged, and within those groupings there are variations, too: some ranged heroes fire fast-moving arrows straight forwards, others throw short-range bombs at anything nearby and deal splash damage, for example. As you progress through the game, certain enemies will release additional heroes whom you can “collect” — these are then added to your “snake”, tagging along behind your lead hero and performing their own individual attacks when appropriate. Heroes other than the lead can be defeated without penalty (besides losing them, obviously) while if the lead hero either runs out of health or ploughs into a wall or enemy they die immediately and the game is over.

To progress through the game, you have to defeat a particular number of enemies on each level. This number increases with each subsequent level, but so too do the number of enemies on screen at once and the different types of assailant you’ll have to deal with. The further you manage to get in one playthrough, the more types of hero you’ll unlock and the longer your maximum “snake” length becomes in all subsequent games. Heroes also gain experience when they’re used as the lead, and level up through three distinct levels. They can also be levelled up early by paying with the gems you find scattered around the levels.

The “free to play” bit primarily comes in the form of “Tokens”, which are Nimble Quest’s equivalent of “Bux” from Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes. Here, though, they’re not used to bypass inconveniences; instead, they’re used for actually useful things. They can be spent on buffs before each level starts. They can be spent on continuing after death — and pleasingly, this prevents itself from becoming a “pay to win” scenario by forcing you to restart the level you’re on with your score and team as it was then rather than simply magically resurrecting without penalty — and they may also be spent on competing in the social “Arena” leaderboards in cooperation with friends. Like Bux, they’re awarded at a healthy rate through normal play, so there’s absolutely no obligation to pay for them unless you’re a bit spend-happy with them. Crucially, though, the game never stops you from playing if you don’t have any tokens — it never forces you to sit through long wait times or anything like that; it just means you need to earn some more before you can use what effectively amount to very slight “cheats”.

It’s this “monetising without inconveniencing the player” thing that makes me look very favourably upon Nimble Quest. At no point do I feel like I’m being punished for not purchasing currency — in fact, the game has more longevity if you don’t pay, because it’ll take you longer to level up all your heroes and get good enough at the game to survive the very challenging later levels. Nothing in the game feels like “pay to win” — even the continue feature is well-implemented so as to allow you the opportunity to correct a mistake while still running the risk of actually doing worse than you did on your previous attempt.

Most important, though, is the fact that Nimble Quest is actually a good game. No-one really wanted to admit that Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes just weren’t very interesting or fun once you got over the aesthetic and humour in them, but Nimble Quest has been designed as a fun game first and foremost rather than a monetisation vehicle, and it really shows. It’s a top-quality mobile game, and one which every iOS owner should have on their device. This is how you do free-to-play right… and this is how you do mobile gaming right, too. Please download and support it to send the right message to NimbleBit. More of this and less tap-tap-tap-snore nonsense, please.