Stagehand is an irritatingly addictive Reverse-Platformer.

So what is an Reverse-Platformer you might ask? Well I didn’t quite know myself until I gave Stagehand a go. Think Mario (Frank in this case) except you don’t actually control the character, but the world around him.

Now let me begin by letting you know that I selected Stagehand for one simple reason- it was Featured on the App Store… so it must be great right? Well I’ll let you read my thoughts and decide for yourself.

The thought of taking the usual platformer and tackling it with such an obscure way intrigued me and I’ll let you know right now that after paying £1.99 I was initially quite disappointed. This was due to the fact that I hadn’t realised it was an endless runner, I was expecting levels as typical platformers tend to follow.

As Frank runs across the screen you need to move the environment up or down in order to help him along his way, collecting coins en route. If you’re too slow then the screen catches up to you. I died trying, then I died again and I died again. I really wasn’t happy with the game as it felt far too difficult and starting with a random environment each time, you can’t rely on memory to get you by. As I said I was disappointed, however, an hour later and I found myself still playing along, eager to beat my previous scores.

It’s a rather simple concept but offers great satisfaction once you begin to get the hang of it. But, as most endless runners feel, it seems to lack reward or progress. Sure there’s characters that can be unlocked by the looks of it but I’m far from being skilful enough to achieve this yet.

The graphics are indeed the familiar simple pixelated style we see tend to see far to often nowadays but Stagehand is far from being a cheap knock off. It really is quite polished; the environment seems to react quite well to your raising and lowering without obvious distruption. The background music is quite enjoyable and doesn’t feel monotonous. When you die it even records your death and gives you the option of exporting it as a gif to social media.

I just wish that they’d taken the concept and put it into a full blown game with levels and possible updates. I’m not saying it’s not worth the £1.99 price tag, you get a good game that’s had a lot of work put into it and thankfully no adverts or micro transactions, but it is a little steep for what you get, compared to other mobile games anyways.

All in all I can’t seem to put the bloody game down. I just want to get better at it. But do I think I’ll be addicted in a weeks time? No. Will I still be playing it on the toilet in a months time, probably. It’s endless of course, but an endless game that I’ll routinely come back to.

Check out the trailer below…