Framed as really solid gameplay, but that's pretty much it, which is a bit problematic because it felt original and I had a good time playing it, but I was just puzzled as to the lack of meat around the bone, albeit how solid the bone really was. You play the game by moving frames of a comic around and it influences the actions that take place. I have to say that the silhouettes of characters work well until they add eyes to them - they just look weird - and the jazzy music fits the tone of the game quite well. It's got charm.
But the game is terribly barebones. The only options you have is to restart a page of the comic with a button in the top left, otherwise, that's it. No way to see how far you've come - or to come back to an earlier page, no way to fast-forward the action while characters take their sweet time moving from frame to frame doing actions you might have seen multiple times. Some additional controls and options for these things would have been nice. The goal of each page is to get to the end without getting stopped by hazards - mostly cops. Say there is a frame with a cop barring the way and another frame of a light switch, if you let your character go, he'll get stopped by the cop. If you switch the frames, he'll turn off the lights first, then pass near the cop undetected, it's a nice concept.
They add more mechanics later on - but they're never clearly explained - such as being able to rotate panels instead of merely switching them, or even using panels multiple times - which took me a bit of time to catch on - so you can create more complex situations where your character will trigger something in one frame only to come back there later to do other things. From time to time there are more cinematic pages where all you need to do is flip two panels to make the story progress forward, it's a good way to make the story go without words or voice acting, although after a while, you feel like you're doing the same thing over and over with no real progression in the narrative.
Finally, the last thing that bugs me about Framed is how easy it can be. Don't get me wrong, you need to think a bit to get each puzzle in one go, but over non stop trial and error, everything becomes a matter of time and perseverance. You're not graded on anything so you can retry as much as you want without any consequence. Not even a small medal if you beat a level under X tries. It just trivializes the whole thing and almost removes any kind of fail state, the only punishment for failing being that you have to re watch the page being attempted again.
But in any case, that shouldn't stop you from trying Framed if you like puzzle games on iOS that use the device quite well and are as equally clever.
