The Pascal’s Wager: Annunciation debuts today on Apple’s iOS as an exclusive that takes the experience of playing high-quality mobile games up a notch.
The $7 game is an action role-playing game from publisher Giant Network and developer TipWorks. Pascal’s Wager is graphically beautiful, with high-end visuals, audio, and gameplay that is similar to From Software’s Dark Souls games.
Pascal’s Wager is actually based on an argument from a 17th-century philosopher, Blaise Pascal, who posited that humans bet with their lives that God either exists or does not. The game debuts on Android in the second quarter.
Apple showed off the title at its recent fall products event as a way to tout the cutting-edge chip and display technology in the iPhone 11 and iPad Pro devices. I’ve played it, and it feels like a console game. The game’s character models are a little angular, perhaps deliberately so for style reasons, but the shadows and lighting are pretty realistic for a mobile game. It starts out with a long cutscene, emphasizing story and mood. It’s quite cryptic.
The game is set in a dark world shrouded in a mist, with plenty of dim light and mysterious places. You have to clash in swordfights with bosses in a story that spans eight chapters. The game has no microtransactions or ads, and it will have post-launch downloadable content as well as player-vs.-player multiplayer modes in the future.The music makes use of a full orchestra. The sound is excellent, and it has voice acting. The game plays with touchscreen controls, but Giant recommends that you use a game controller. It has four main playable characters.
TipWorks is a Shangai-based studio owned by Giant, with 30 developers. Giant was founded in 2004, and it is a publicly traded game publisher in China.