Blackbar review: An iPhone game about censorship that… No wait, come back! It's really good!

Blackbar is a simple, elegant and witty word game for the iPhone. It's also a dystopian sci-fi adventure storyabout the cruelty of censorship. Yeah, now you're interested! Read on for our Blackbar review.

The best puzzle games for iPad & iPhone

A politically literate tirade against censorship; an Orwellian adventure story told through one half of an increasingly mangled email exchange; a puzzle game based entirely around decoding blocks of text. None of these things might sound like your idea of a merry time, but Blackbar is odd like that.

Playing the part of a downtrodden citizen of a dimly sketched dystopia, you receive a series of messages with parts blacked out by censors, and have to work out what the missing words are. It's easy at first, as these things generally are; but the game takes the idea and runs with it, tangling and weaving its internal logic until your head hurts.

You start off with this...

...and start filling in the blanks like this

It can be a frustrating game, in truth: we found ourselves head-scratching over a single word needed to unlock the next screen for days at a time. And the actual substance of the puzzles, when you remove this non-playing thinking time, is relatively thin. But Blackbar makes up for this by having a rather wonderful story - a story that's barely there, whispered to you in code and reassembled piece by piece.

Blackbar is often funny, particularly when the censors grow suspicious and start sending out entertainingly euphemistic threats; it's also a little bit politically charged. Every now and then it will catch you off guard and be rather moving. The writers, likethe US author Mark Z. Danielewski, are aware that piecing together the story yourself makes it that much more affecting.

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Blackbar review: An iPhone game about censorship that... No wait, come back! It's really good!