Blek

Most puzzle games give you a set of tools. Blek gives you a pen, then keeps drawing after you let go.

The idea fits in one sentence. You draw a short stroke, lift your finger, and the stroke keeps repeating its exact motion across the screen. You win by shaping that stroke so it picks up every colored circle on the board and misses every black hole. There are no moves to memorize and no single correct answer. The rule explains itself the moment the first line is drawn.

Blek comes from kunabi brother, the Vienna studio of brothers Denis and Davor Mikan. It launched on iOS on December 3, 2013 and did very well for such a stark game, winning a 2014 Apple Design Award and topping the App Store paid chart. Critics liked it without raving. Edge called it “a thing of elegant, intuitive beauty,” and that holds up. The store agrees: it holds 4.5 out of 5 from 801 ratings on the US App Store.

Where you can buy it today is a stranger story. Blek is still sold on iOS as a paid app designed for iPad. Pay-once games like this have become rare on a store now dominated by free-to-play. The Android version came out in 2014 and was later pulled from Google Play. Broken Rules, the Austrian studio behind And Yet It Moves, published a Wii U version. Nintendo has since closed the Wii U eShop to new purchases.

In practice, that leaves Apple’s App Store as the only place to buy Blek new. So the question is whether a 2013 touch puzzler is still worth paying for. For the right puzzle fans, it is.

• The Looping Stroke: Every line you draw turns into a small machine. When you lift your finger, Blek replays both the stroke’s shape and its timing, so how fast you draw matters as much as where you draw.
• Many Ways to Win: No level has just one answer. A quick flick, a lazy S-curve or a long looping spiral can all work. Each board is closer to an open sandbox than to a lock with one key.
• Two Simple Rules: Collect every colored circle and avoid every black hole. The whole game is built from those two rules, and it gets harder by tightening the gaps rather than piling on complexity.
• Calligraphic Art Style: Brush-like strokes on a plain white background, inspired by the Bauhaus, Japanese calligraphy and the interactive artist Golan Levin.
• Unusual Soundtrack: The music uses excerpts by composer Erin Gee, an art-world choice you rarely see in a mobile puzzle game.
• Wii U Edition: A version published by Broken Rules, played on the GamePad’s touchscreen.

Gameplay Loop

Each try in Blek is short: look, draw, watch, fail, adjust. Because the stroke repeats itself, you aren’t really solving the puzzle with your finger. You’re programming it. You give the game one instruction, a shape plus a speed, and it runs that instruction until the board is clear or the line hits something.

That’s the smart part. Blek is a programming game you control with a gesture, dressed up as a doodle. A stroke drawn in one second becomes a pattern that crosses the whole screen, so small choices add up. A curve that bends slightly too far at the start drifts a finger’s width off course a few repeats later. The game teaches you to think about where the line is heading, not just where it is.

The game’s best decision is not dictating a solution. Many good puzzle games are really locks: there’s one key, and the fun is finding it. Blek’s boards work more like targets. A level might be cleared with a tiny zigzag that stitches across the screen, or with one wide arc that sweeps everything up in a single pass. Neither answer is the “correct” one. Critics and players praised this freedom more than anything else, and they were right to. Clearing a hard board feels like the player’s own work, not the designer’s.

Difficulty and Pacing

That freedom comes at a price, and Blek pays it in the second half. Early levels are forgiving. The gaps between hazards are wide, and almost any reasonable stroke gets close. Around level 20, the margins shrink sharply. Black holes crowd the circles, and a stroke with the right idea can still fail because the drawing was imprecise.

This is the most common complaint about Blek, and it’s a fair one. A puzzle that’s hard to understand is different from a puzzle that’s hard to execute, and the late levels often slide into the second kind. The needed shape is clear, but drawing it cleanly enough is not. Once a stroke is out, it can’t be adjusted. It gets drawn again from scratch, and again.

Some players will enjoy that, the way people enjoy steady-hand arcade games. For others, a clever thinking puzzle turns into a test of hand control, and the frustration is real. It’s a deliberate design choice, not a flaw in execution, but kunabi brother leans on it too hard. The core idea is strong enough to carry the game without margins this thin.

Onboarding Friction

Blek is very easy to pick up. It needs no tutorial or explanation. You draw a line, watch it keep going, and get it. Later levels mostly get harder by asking for more precision, not by adding rules you have to learn. Plenty of mobile puzzlers add a new mechanic every few levels to hide a thin core. Blek’s core is solid, so it doesn’t need to.

That restraint also shapes the pacing. With nothing to manage between attempts, one more try costs almost nothing, so Blek fits a two-minute wait as well as a long evening. The same speed makes the late-game spike worse: rapid-fire failures pile up before the annoyance registers.

Replay Value

Blek’s lasting appeal depends on temperament. Because levels have many solutions, a cleared board can be revisited in search of a cleaner or more surprising stroke. That’s fun if you enjoy style for its own sake. If you play puzzle games to clear them and move on, a finished Blek will probably stay finished. The value is front-loaded, which is reasonable for a paid game but worth knowing going in.

Blek’s look is also its argument. A white background, colored circles, black holes and your stroke: nothing else competes for your eye. The brush-like line, drawing on Japanese calligraphy, the Bauhaus and Golan Levin’s interactive art, makes the motion feel hand-drawn in a way a flat vector line wouldn’t. A good stroke sweeping across the board looks less like a game event and more like a sketch finishing itself.

The minimalism does practical work too. With almost nothing on screen, all you read is shapes: where the circles are, where the holes are and where your line will go next. That clarity keeps the game fair even when it’s brutal. You never fail because you couldn’t see a hazard. You fail because you misjudged it.

The downside is that it has little personality. Blek is stark almost to the point of anonymity. There’s no world or character to connect with, and the bright white screen is built to read as calm, though over long stretches it can tip into sterile.

By design, performance hinges on one thing: how accurately the game captures touch. Blek replays the timing of a stroke as well as its shape, so the whole concept depends on the screen recording a finger faithfully. There’s very little on screen to render, so a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware. Blek is still for sale on iOS, which means it has kept up with Apple’s platform changes — no small thing when Apple’s move to 64-bit apps alone wiped thousands of older apps off the store.

iOS

The iPad is where Blek belongs. It was designed for the iPad, and the bigger screen matters in a game about precise drawing. A hand covering the board is a constant problem in touch games that demand accuracy, and a large screen reduces it. There’s more room for long strokes, and more of the board stays visible while drawing. On the late levels, an Apple Pencil is worth trying: iPadOS treats it as a normal touch in apps that weren’t built for it, and a pen tip is more precise than a fingertip. Blek is sold as a one-time $4.99 purchase, which suits a game this focused.

Nintendo (Wii U)

The Wii U version was published by Broken Rules, and critics rated it slightly below the iOS original. Its best feature is the GamePad’s stylus, which is more precise than a finger for the late levels. Its weaknesses are the GamePad’s smaller, lower-resolution screen compared with an iPad, and the fact that the TV adds little to a game played entirely on the controller. The bigger problem is that it can’t be bought anymore. The Wii U eShop has closed, so this version only exists for people who already own it. Android players are in the same position, since the Android version left Google Play.

Blek is one of the clearest examples of a game that could only exist on a touchscreen. Its one idea, a stroke that keeps repeating its motion, is simple to grasp and surprisingly deep. The clean art does practical work: with almost nothing on screen, every circle and hole reads at a glance, which makes the game easier to play. The Apple Design Award and the strong sales were earned, not the product of a marketing push.

It isn’t flawless. The difficulty jump after level 20 turns an elegant thinking game into a test of steady hands more often than it should, and the game gives you nothing to soften that. Its availability has also shrunk to a single storefront. Still, Blek is on the App Store and it holds up. If you own an iPad and like puzzles that let you find your own solution, we recommend it — with the caveat that the back half demands patience as much as thought.