The Load Bearing game splits at the hinge when you fold an iPhone Duo half open, with the well, your stash and your next pieces on the top half and the controls on the bottom half. Open the phone flat and the whole game fills the inner display, and closed it plays one-handed on the cover display with three touch schemes.
Load Bearing is a falling-block roguelite that is available on the App Store. It is not only for the foldable, because the same game runs on iPhone, iPad and Android for a one-time $5.00 with no ads and no in-app purchases.
Half open, the Load Bearing game keeps the well up top
In the half-open pose, the bottom half carries a full set of controls, your Collapse button and your items, right under your thumbs. The top half keeps the well, the city and your deck in view.
What each pose of the iPhone Duo does
- Half open, the well, your stash and your next pieces stay on the top half, and the pad, menus and yard sit on the bottom half
- Flat open, the whole game fills the tall inner display
- Closed, the game plays on the cover display, one-handed, with three touch schemes
Greens, a mini-golf game, also gives the top half of the iPhone Duo a job of its own. On iPhone and iPad, Load Bearing supports touch, keyboard and controllers.
Every run is a ten-floor building
You leave one column empty and bank rows beside it, then fire the Collapse to clear all the banked rows at once. Banked rows count double toward a floor’s target, and each Collapse narrows the well by one column, down to a minimum of six.
Each floor is a different job, such as Lay the Foundation, Clear the Site, Material Shortage or Punch List. Between floors you spend your pay in the yard on new shapes, which run from two-block scraps to seven-block monsters. You also buy relics that bend the rules and tools like Cut, Settle and Pour.
Your pieces are a deck rather than a random stream, so you can scrap the shapes you hate. The Fabricator lets you draw your own piece of three to six cells on a 5 by 5 pad and add it to your deck.
Twenty Building Codes end in foremen
The game has 20 Building Codes, each harder than the last, and a foreman waits at the end of every stretch of five. Each foreman plays you in a best-of-three match in one shared well, taking turns. You can also challenge a friend by their code or take whoever is waiting, and a match sends only moves, with no chat.
The latest updates
- The Power Pieces patch gives the six- and seven-cell pieces powers, such as the Anvil that crushes the stack under it, and powers cost score, so leave them off for high scores
- Streamer mode lets Twitch chat vote on your run or play you head to head
- Lessons now end with a Play a Run button, and the game keeps your best score for each Building Code
The developer says AI agents wrote the code under human direction, and that the foreman portraits, voices and music are AI-generated. On iPhone, Load Bearing needs iOS 15 or later.
