When it comes to games that tug at my mobile gaming nostalgia strings, Sway from Illusion Labs is right near the top of the list. What’s that you say" You’ve never even heard of Sway" Well that’s not surprising. It arrived when the App Store was still in its infancy, and commercially it wasn’t a success. However, for those who were kicking around the TouchArcade forums in late 2008 and early 2009, Sway was this shining example of the type of experiences developers could create that only seemed possible on an iPhone. The idea in Sway is that you can grab onto a wall with your right hand touching the right side of the screen, and with your left hand by touching the left side of the screen. You can also swing and sway your momentum back and forth, even going into full rotations to build up even more momentum. You use these mechanics to swing and grab your way through a level, collecting bonus items and racing against the clock, until you reach the end goal. Illusion Labs’ own extremely old tutorial video from 2009 does a good job at showing you exactly what the controls are like in Sway.
Now, it’s not like Sway was the first swinging game ever invented, and it wasn’t even the only swinging platformer on mobile at the time as RastaMonkey offered a somewhat similar experience. But the “it" factor in Sway was Illusion Labs themselves. They had already built a reputation for themselves on mobile with their previ...