Culture

Platforms: iOS (4.5/5)

A sweetly Up-style elderly couple are taking a Sunday drive. They lounge with the top down, a delicate autumn sun warming the brim of his top hat and the dome of her bonnet. Totally oblivious, are they, to the destruction taking place around their little blue people mover. As the street cracks and twists beneath them and they are buffeted backwards and forwards, they reminisce, I can only imagine, about character-building times of bomb-sirens and the subtle romance of fresh baguettes.
 
Bumpy Road perpetuates archaic senile stereotypes in a relentlessly adorable context. As a wave of cobbled street heads along the screen, it makes a series of honky-tonk plips in an ascending scale. As day turns to night, the street is bathed in shadow, and the stunningly drawn metropolitan backgrounds are seen in an entirely new light. There are windmills. Signs pointing to “Simogo”, whatever that is. And it's all wrapped up in utterly charming accordion music. It really is joyous, and it's in the palm of your $1.29 spending hand.
 
Just when you thought all the input methods that work really well for the touch screen have come and gone, up sidles Bumpy Road to prove you incorrect. You operate the game, not by something as clumsy as moving the car with your finger, but by moving the world around it. The player smudges their finger across the bottom of the screen, and deforms the road into a mobile speed-bump that can be used either to push the clattery wee car around the place or pop it up onto a higher platform. It works wonderfully.
 
The number of power-ups, bonus levels and play modes stitch the detail onto an already intricate tea-cozy.