When we first talked about Poor Thief (Free) from developer Beep Yeah! a little over a month ago, I wasn’t quite sure what genre of puzzler to call it. It’s one of those games where you swipe your character in any of the 4 cardinal directions and that character will continue to move in that direction until hitting a solid surface. The goal is to reach the end point of each level, typically while collecting items along the way. I dunno, I’ve just taken to calling them slidey puzzlers, and there’s certainly no shortage of them on mobile, but there’s something very special about Poor Thief that sets it apart from the pack.
The main gimmick in Poor Thief is that it uses the “die and then use your dead body to help you in future runs" mechanic of games like Sometimes You Die or Persophone. Here when you die you’ll actually turn into a tombstone which acts as a solid tile that can be used to stop your movement, block attacks from enemies, and more. As you can imagine in a game like this, being able to “create" these solid tiles when you need to can be a huge help and is in fact key to finding the correct route through many of the levels.
It can also be used to brute force your way to the exit in certain situations. Every level has a par number of moves that if you hit you’ll earn a special star. Hitting these pars can be extremely tricky, and often I’d feel like the smartest man alive just because I comp...