First, a quick history lesson.

Tim Langdell – a man whose name I was not aware of until I set out to write this review – was a thorn in the side of Mobigame for several years. The release of an initially iOS-only puzzle game EDGE was subjected to legal complications, thanks to Mr. Langdell’s claims of owning the trademark on the word ‘edge’; EDGE (the game) was intermittently available on the iTunes store while the dispute was being resolved.

When EA – the publisher of the excellent parkour action-adventure Mirror’s Edge – got involved in ‘Edgegate’ by requesting that Langdell’s company Edge Games have their trademarks cancelled after he had foolishly gone on the offensive, a court ultimately came to the conclusion after several blows between the two parties that Langdell was essentially ‘trolling’ several industry companies (the gaming magazine Edge was somewhat involved in this too). Once you’re done reading up on this ridiculous/fascinating case and Langdell’s subsequent fall, there are some words below I’ve wrote about a game that you may be interested in.

Even at its most infuriating, EDGE is a super rewarding puzzle game. A fiery original soundtrack pounds furiously alongside the frenzied, dynamically changing landscapes that look to trip you up at any given moment, playing on your fears and expectations with delectable consequences.

Your cube feels alive yet trapped in a Tron-type world where cunning ‘nega’ cubes will interact with the environments to impede your progress and the environments themselves shift around on a whim. This unpredictability is in itself the show-piece of the puzzles here, especially when you so fervently strive to achieve the ‘S’ ratings for each of the 48 available levels in the ‘extended’ edition of the original EDGE release.

Furthermore, the level designs bare a welcome semblance to Echochrome in that your navigation and analysis of individual sections – thanks to the astute lack of a 360 degree view control – can be mischievously impaired by impaired perspective. All levels are completable but many will require return visits to memorise and master: equal parts criticism and acclaim is the necessity to perform trial runs.

Later levels are intensely intricate and an end-level emphasis on simultaneous consistency and speed means you’ll be very hard-pressed to complete every level first time in record time; gathering all the collectible ‘prisms’ scattered around each level rewards you with a ghost of your best time for you to compare with though, arguably an acknowledgement on the developer’s part that you will fail before you succeed.

The overarching idea is quite simply to manoeuvre a cube across a range of 3D ‘mazes’ suspended above black, bottomless voids in the fastest time possible. Floors and walls will move, special sections will shrink you but give you access to climb and the aforementioned ‘Dark Cube’ (a new addition to EDGE Extended) will hamper your scampers, all factors – alongside the streamline-prevention prism collecting side mission – that will affect your overall time and letter-based score.

EDGE isn’t working entirely against you though: two fundamental features that help immensely in combating the obstructions are the ability to balance on walls – where the game’s name is derived from – and a more than useful mini-map in the corner of the screen that lets you work your way through levels that intentionally hide your cube from view. The former takes a bit of practice, and is what made me switch from touch screen controls to the on-screen D-pad (you can play this with inbuilt accelerometers if you must; good luck with that).

Running at 60fps and with an updated 3D engine, EDGE EX looks gorgeous. This update has allowed Mobigame to improve the quality of the presentation, changing smoothly transitioning camera angles and more interactive and thus manic designs in later levels creating a very cinematic experience. Further updates from the original game – the bigger soundtrack, a Game Center sync option that tracks your progress across all Apple devices – all help with the super-high enjoyment factor.

EDGE EX is not a sequel, instead a whole new game: leaving behind a dark history that seemed to plague its predecessor it’s free to build on an already strong platform to deliver a complex, engaging puzzle experience. Each area of the game feels finely tuned: EDGE EX is a masterpiece of attention to detail, intricate in design and innovative in concept. Mobigame for the price of a meal are offering you an immensely rewarding game; considering you’ll probably be inclined to skip a meal to keep playing, that seems like a fair compromise.

EDGE EX was included in the Android-compatible Humble Indie Bundle, and is available to buy for both Android and iOS devices.

Version reviewed: Android v1.83.2.