The floor looks solid until you stand on it. Then it drops, or a spike snaps from the ceiling, or the exit door slides a tile left the moment you reach it. Level Devil is a 2D platformer for iPhone that disguises lethal traps as ordinary levels. The subtitle, NOT A Troll Game, is its first lie.
You get three inputs: left, right, and jump. The art is flat blocks, a little black runner, a doorway, and a row of spikes under the tan floor. Early levels hide one trick. Later ones pile on buzzsaws, projectiles, teleports, and stretches where gravity flips, and the only way to learn a trap is to die to it and respawn a half-second later.
That loop is the whole game, and it holds up because the deaths are fair and the restart is instant. Level Devil started as a browser troll game on Poki before this App Store port, and the reviews split the way browser troll games always do: people either love being toyed with or quit on principle. iPhoners with a soft spot for that genre will get the joke on the first spike. The recurring knock is length. Pocket Gamer scored it a 3.5 and reckoned a decent player could clear the whole thing in a lunch break, and the loudest complaint in the App Store reviews is the ad load, not the difficulty.
What works
- Traps you can't see coming once, then a fair, instant respawn to try again
- One-handed, three-button controls that suit short bursts
What to know
- Pocket Gamer clocked the full run at about a lunch break; replay fades once you know the tricks
- App Store reviewers report an ad after nearly every level
It runs offline and the levels are bite-size, so it suits a subway ride better than a couch session. Just know the surprises only land once.
