One of the more reliable means of drawing attention in marketing is to use the biggest numbers you can find for your product or service's features. It's historically been very useful in selling video games, with RPGs claiming dozens of hours of gameplay, open world games boasting about the sizes of their maps, and platformer games talking up the number of levels they have. Thing have become ludicrous in mobile gaming, with Candy Crush offering a couple thousand levels and many platformers eventually expanding out to over a hundred stages. Never mind that the levels might be short, or easily constructed. The players will find that out later, and when they do, they may well not even care.

Dan the Man [Free], on the other hand, offers up a mere 12 levels in its story mode. I won't lie, my initial reaction was disbelief at how small that number was. Even the original Super Mario Bros. has 32 stages to play through, after all. It's not an impressive number. After playing Dan the Man for a while, though, I came away with a different take. These dozen levels are big, filled with interesting secrets to uncover, and are quite well-designed. The developer could have snipped each one into smaller sections to inflate the stage count, but it would have resulted in a different feel entirely. I think I see what they were going for, so I can respect that they set the game up the way that they did. The story mode is still rather short, mind you. It only takes a few hours to play through th...