14 DAY TRIAL // Give FlapThulhu a try and you won’t be able to touch Flappy Bird or its subsequent clones ever again. The latest in this string of spinoffs, FlapThulhu: Flappy Madness is the best-looking game of its kind released so far, and it's inspired by “The Call of Cthulhu.” It’s also the hardest of all Flappy clones ever released.
Developer Madgarden doesn’t seem desperate for popularity, stating only “Flap through the horrible gates of R'lyeh and unleash the Madness to open a portal to the eldritch dimension... or will the madness take you?”
The feature highlights are “Flapping” and “Madness” which, again, doesn’t really help the player decide whether or not to waste their cellular allowance downloading this thing in the great outdoors.
But I was intrigued by the graphics, so I gave it a shot. And boy, was I impressed.
First off, FlapThulhu is set in R'lyeh, a fictional lost city that originally appeared in the H. P. Lovecraft short story “The Call of Cthulhu.” Got that from Wikipedia, I’m actually not that well-read.
First published in Weird Tales in 1928, the story says R'lyeh is a sunken city in the South Pacific and the prison of the entity called Cthulhu. Here’s a neat passage from the book that pretty much explains the superb graphics in FlapThulhu.
“The nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh…was built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults.”
Featuring the same bizarre architecture attributed to non-Euclidean geometry, FlapThulhu: Flappy Madness lets you guide the fictional cosmic entity known as the “Cthulhu” through a series of stalactites and stalagmites (of sorts), which are far more narrow than in any other Flappy Bird clone to date.
The game is admittedly pretty hard, and it may not keep you stuck to the screen like the original Flappy managed to, but it’s quite an excursion! In fact, it’s a complete audiovisual experience! The eerie sound effects and shifting graphics will literally transport you to R'lyeh, just as Lovecraft probably intended to do with his book.
The game also received an update recently. Version 1.1 reportedly fixes “some problems,” changes the chirpy button sound that many players thought of as annoying, tweaks some of the effects, and includes a bit more madness.
FlapThulhu: Flappy Madness calls for iOS 4.3 and a compatible iDevice, starting with iPhone 3GS, iPad 2, and iPod touch fourth-generation. The game is free to download and, as far as I’ve been able to notice, doesn’t include nagging ads like other Flappy Bird clones.
Disclaimer This is a Personal Thoughts piece reflecting the author’s personal opinion on matters relating to Apple and / or the products associated with the Apple brand. This article should not be taken as the official stance of Softpedia on Apple-related matters.