Teslagrad

Teslagrad doesn’t explain itself. It has no narrator, no dialogue boxes and no codex to scroll through. A boy runs from a despotic king’s soldiers, takes shelter in the long-abandoned Tesla Tower, and from there the game leaves you to work out two things on your own: what happened to this kingdom, and how its physics work. That trust drives the whole design. It’s also why people still talk about a game that first shipped on PC in 2013.

The developer is Rain Games, a small Norwegian studio, and Teslagrad is the game that made its name. It belongs to the generation of art-driven indie puzzle-platformers that followed Braid and Limbo: short, handcrafted and built around one mechanical idea pushed as far as it will go. Here the idea is electromagnetism. Objects take a red or blue charge. Opposites pull together and matching colors push apart, and nearly every room is a new question about what you can do with that rule.

Where the game sits in the market depends on where you buy it. On Steam and Nintendo hardware, it’s a modestly sized catalogue title in a very crowded indie platformer field. On iOS and Android, where Playdigious publishes the ports, it’s something rarer: a one-time purchase with no ads and no in-app purchases, sold in stores full of energy timers and gacha banners. That alone makes the mobile version stand out.

The reception has been solid without being rapturous. It holds 4.4 out of 5 on the US App Store from 216 ratings and a Metacritic score of 77. The praise and the complaints line up closely: the art, the atmosphere, the music and the wordless storytelling earn admiration, while the difficulty spikes, the boss fights, the short length and hard-to-find collectibles draw criticism. Both camps have a point, and the rest of this review explains why.

• Magnetic Charge Glove: Gives objects a red or blue charge. This is the core mechanic, and you’ll use it to move blocks, redirect hazards and build your own launch points.
• Blink Teleport: A short-range dash through walls and barriers. It opens up both traversal and puzzle solutions, and it gives you a way out of danger.
• Teslamancer Cloak: Lets the boy charge himself, so he becomes part of the magnetic system. He can cling to surfaces, get repelled across gaps and ride invisible force.
• Non-Linear World: More than 100 hand-drawn rooms in a steampunk take on old Europe, connected without loading screens.
• Wordless Storytelling: No text and no dialogue. The kingdom’s history comes through the environments, background art and staging.
• Five Boss Fights: Demanding encounters that test everything the rooms before them taught you.
• Scroll Collectibles: Hidden throughout the tower as a reward for players who search every corner.
• Premium Mobile Model: One purchase, no ads, no IAP, and MFi controller support on iOS.

The Core Loop: Red, Blue and Momentum

Teslagrad’s best trick is making a physics rule feel like a movement system. The glove alone gives you a puzzle game: charge this block blue, that plate red, and watch them snap together. The cloak is where it becomes a platformer. Once the boy carries a charge, the level geometry becomes something you can steer with. Match your color to a surface and you get flung away from it. Flip to the opposite color and you stick to it. Link a few of those moments together and you’re crossing a room in a way the level designer clearly planned but never pointed out.

The blink keeps the loop from settling into routine. It’s a short-range teleport, so it’s a precision tool, not a way to skip the level design. The best rooms ask you to combine all three: charge a block, blink past a barrier, flip your own polarity mid-air and land on a surface you couldn’t reach a second earlier. At its best, Teslagrad makes the physics feel like something you worked out yourself instead of a recipe you followed.

Teaching Without Words

Wordless games often mistake vagueness for depth. Teslagrad mostly avoids that. Its onboarding comes through level design: each new tool arrives in a safe space, then shows up in a harder context, then gets combined with what you already know. When it works, you pick up the rules without noticing you’re being taught.

When it doesn’t work, there’s nothing to fall back on. No hint system exists, and there’s no text to rescue you. Some rooms are built so that a failed attempt and a missed interaction look identical, and that ambiguity is expensive in a game with this little margin for error. It’s the real cost of the no-words approach. Most of the time it’s worth paying.

The Difficulty Problem

This is where Teslagrad loses points. The boy dies in a single hit, and the game asks for frame-tight precision in stretches that follow fairly gentle rooms. The curve isn’t a ramp. It’s a staircase with a few steps missing. Respawns are quick, which helps, but the criticism of sudden difficulty jumps is fair.

The five boss fights are the biggest offenders. They’re creative and visually striking, and each one is a real test of what you’ve learned. They’re also long, pattern-heavy encounters with no room for mistakes, and one slip sends you back to the start. For experienced platformer players, they’re the high point. For the audience the art and story attract, which is a broader group than hardcore platformer fans, they can be a wall. There’s no difficulty option to soften them, and there should be. An assist mode would cost the game nothing and would open its best material to more players.

Exploration and the Scroll Hunt

The non-linear structure puts Teslagrad close to Metroidvania territory without fully committing to it. New tools open old paths, and the connected tower rewards backtracking. The scroll collectibles give completionists a reason to keep going, but some are hidden well enough that finding them feels more like pixel-hunting than discovery. Other games in the genre handle this with a map that marks unexplored rooms. Teslagrad leaves you to your own memory.

Length

Most players will see the credits in a handful of hours. The campaign doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it doesn’t pad its runtime either. Still, people who pay full price and finish over a weekend will reasonably want more. The scroll hunt adds some time, but the core experience is short.

The art direction is Teslagrad’s strongest asset. The hand-drawn steampunk style, a version of old Europe full of copper, rain and tired machinery, has aged far better than most 3D games from the same period. Hand-drawn 2D doesn’t date the way polygon counts do, and this game shows it. The background art does the storytelling work that dialogue would do elsewhere, and it does it with confidence.

The orchestral score, with its Russian influences, backs up the melancholy tone without overwhelming it. It’s a strong fit for the material.

The interface is almost nonexistent, which fits the wordless approach. There’s very little HUD, so charge states are communicated through color on the objects themselves. That keeps the screen clean. It also means colorblind players may struggle with a red/blue system that doesn’t appear to offer a pattern-based alternative.

On the technical side, a world of 100-plus rooms without loading screens is built to keep exploration flowing, and a 2D game of this scale should be light on modern hardware. Touch controls remain the open question on mobile: a precision platformer with one-hit deaths is a poor fit for glass buttons, and that will land differently from device to device.

• iOS: The strongest mobile option on paper. Touch controls are workable, but MFi controller support is what turns an iPad or iPhone into a good way to play Teslagrad.
• Android: You get the same premium, ad-free deal from Playdigious. The listing doesn’t make the explicit controller promise the iOS version does, so if you plan to pair a gamepad, confirm it works on your device before committing to the boss fights on a touchscreen.
• Steam: A controller is strongly recommended. Keyboard works, but switching polarity mid-jump is more natural on a gamepad. Hardware requirements are modest, so almost any PC or Steam Deck–class device can run it.
• Nintendo: A strong fit. The game plays in short, room-sized chunks, which suits handheld sessions, and physical buttons fix the biggest problem with the mobile ports. For Switch owners, this is the version we’d point to.

Teslagrad is a well-made game with one big flaw. Rain Games took a single idea, electromagnetic charge, and developed it into a system that works as a puzzle mechanic, a movement mechanic and the basis for its boss fights. The art has aged better than almost anything from its generation. The wordless storytelling shows real restraint, and the music gives the tower real feeling.

It also asks too much, too suddenly, and gives you no way to adjust. The bosses will be the best part for some players and the point where others quit, and a short campaign makes those difficulty spikes harder to forgive. On controller-friendly platforms (Switch, Steam with a gamepad, or iOS with an MFi pad), the precision demands feel fair, and we recommend it to players who fit that description. On a touchscreen, it’s still worth buying, but expect some frustration. On mobile, the ad-free, IAP-free model makes it a better deal than most of what sits around it in the store.