FileWise Invisibles quizzes have existed online for a while now. Each one gives you a set of eight stills with the actors stripped out of the picture and you are asked to identify the movies they come from. It’s a great trivia game for film buffs and it is now on the iPhone, better than ever before.
The game is very simple, as you’d expect, but it’s simplicity is its strength. Rather than providing you with an array of difficulty settings and complex game structures, what FilmWise Invisibles presents you with is a series of stills, each with six options, and you are expected to pick out the correct one.
There are no levels and no end goal to reach. Taking a page from the book of baseball, FilmWise Invisibles gives you three strikes and then kicks you out. If you are stuck on a still and have no idea which movie it’s from, you have to make a random guess, scoring a strike if it turns out to be wrong.
You then have the option to either skip that still or try it again. Irrespective of which option you choose, the point at which you make the third wrong guess is when your game comes to an end. You score a thousand points for every correct answer and lose 300 for the incorrect ones.
As much fun as the game is, the real beauty of it lies in the Retina-ready pictures. The actors, including the extras, have been removed from the pictures with painstaking attention to detail, and it shows in the results. Some of the pictures look hauntingly beautiful with the entire cast cleared away, leaving behind empty clothes standing around in familiar environments.
As you play the game, you unlock the stills that you identify correctly and can later email to someone, save to your device or add to your favourites. There are a total of 200 images for you to unlock in the game and the library can be further extended by 150 images by way of an in-app purchase.
The App Store is teeming with movie trivia apps—another excellent one being IMDb Trivia, for instance—but FilmWise Invisibles differentiates itself from the pack with a unique approach to quizzing and justifies its low purchase price with the beautiful collection of ‘Invisible-ized’ movie images it has on offer.
[FilmWise Invisibles is available for $0.99 on the App Store and is compatible with all iPhones running iOS 4.0 or later. It is not a universal app.]
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