Release date: February 2nd, 2024 | ****Studio: Shapes & Stories
Blackbox on Apple Vision Pro is an evolution of the Apple Design Award winning puzzle game for iOS, leaping beyond your fingertips, through the confines of glass, and into your home and being. Poke bubbles, ponder puzzles, and let the rest gently unfold around you. Become enveloped in reactive visuals, perplexing sounds, and perhaps find something profound.
Unlike Blackbox for iOS, there is no grid of dots and challenges to choose from, instead ethereal soap bubbles float in your space, casting shadows, and popping when poked to unravel their contents into your space to be played with. Whether you pop them with a pointed finger, bat them around, use your gaze, or clap them between your hands the bubbles are an experience in and of themselves.
Blackbox’s challenges, like the iOS version, span the gamut of what Apple Vision Pro is capable of, not only involving you but also your environment, hands, voice, buttons, and so much more that we can’t wait to share. While Blackbox for iOS quickly taught players to think outside the screen to play, Blackbox for visionOS has no actual or virtual screen to tap; Instead visuals envelope you, colors enrobe the world, and you’re empowered to control mysterious puzzle mechanics entirely hands-free.
Not revealed to players until they’ve solved everything is a mysterious liminal space that spans the space between the worlds of Blackbox… what will unfold there, time will tell.
Blackbox is an open-ended spatial experience under active development. We’re hard at work on new curiosities and will continue to expand the game throughout the year. The game is currently $19.99 with no in app purchases; supporting our small team’s work at this price provides early-access to everything we’re currently built and will eventually include in the base game.
Blackbox originally launched in 2016 for iOS as the solo creation of Ryan McLeod. It launched with 42 puzzles and over the years grew to 81. Blackbox layers know nothing is off limits and to never doubt their own curiosity often finding solutions on mountain tops, in dead silence, through collaboration, or instrumental serenades. A sleeper puzzle hit with over 11 million downloads and hundreds of thousands of glowing reviews Blackbox has squarely landed itself amid a storied lineage of outside-the-box puzzle games.
Ryan McLeod started work on Blackbox for Apple Vision Pro in 2023 and quickly realized his ambitions far outpaced what he would be capable of alone. Robert Long (a VR veteran and longtime friend) and Dan Fountain (fellow indie game designer and technical artistry wizard) joined the project in the summer and fall respectively taking Blackbox’s possibilities to previously unfathomable places. Gus Callahan (Blackbox for iOS’s original sound designer) was a part of the project from the start to ensure the game’s spatial audio not only transported players but nudged them along the way to their “ah ha!” moments as thoughtfuly as any of the visuals.