I’ve searched the App Store for some casual games that I can play in the room while waiting for the next Hearthstone HTC Summer Championship match. I came across the game Shell Game AR – Find the Ball.
Shell Game AR (also known as thimblerig, three shells and a pea, the old army game) is a casual ARKit game to just pass some time. There are three red cups and one ball. The white ball is placed under a cup. You can see under which cup it is placed, but once it is covered by the cup you can’t see it any longer. Now the three cups are then shuffled and you need to guess which cup as the ball underneath. You probably remember seeing people in the street doing this game.
Well, it seems like a nice game to play in the evening and pass a few minutes. It’s a free game, so I just downloaded it and start playing.
The game found a surface over the bed and now I was able to start playing.
The game shows me the score and my top score. The game then puts the ball and start scrambling their positions. Sometimes I get it right, sometimes wrong. The longer you progress the more complex and faster the shuffling will be, making it much harder to follow the cup with the ball. Sometimes I just needed to guess, sometimes I was able to follow the cup and tap where it is.
If you guess it right, you get 10 points. If you guess wrong, you lose 5 points.
I was playing until I got to 160 points then I wanted to know how can I fail the game when it’s game over. Apparently, unless I missed something, there is no way to fail. I tried lowering my score to zero, nothing happened, the game just didn’t want to finish. I closed the app and load it up again. The game did remember my highest score, but why there isn’t an option to have a limit number of fails that a player can take before it’s game over. There is no even a leaderboard.
The graphics and the sound effects are so not convincing at all. Why not adding some sound effects when the cups are moving?! The only thing that I like is the animations where the cups are scrambled. This was done right, and I was at least able to sometimes follow the cup with the ball, even when it was very complex scrambling.
Well, at least the developer added a “How to play” section and added a “find a surface” note when the games started, some developers don’t even do that (it happened to me today, I need to call a dev and ask him how to start a specific game).
Well, this is the first Shell augmented reality game I came across. If you like this game or if you just want to pass some time with a simple casual ARKit game that you can play even in a very small space, just download it have some fun.