The Perfect Match (E-Book Version)
Written and Illustrated by
Wayne Anderson
Published by Inky Sprat
Wow, this is definitely something distinctly different and unique. Inky Sprat are firm favourites with us for their brilliant treatments of print books. Here though they've picked a book that I thought would be nigh-on impossible to adapt to the e-book format without some serious planning and manipulation.
For a bit of background, Wayne Anderson's original book had a fairly unique format - spiral bound with pages that flip and combine, so that the illustrations could be transformed into 8000 combinations - representing the guests at a fabulous wedding for a witch and a magician.
Here's a photo of the original book...
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| "The Perfect Match" by Wayne Anderson. Beautiful, puzzling, enigmatic |
Inky Sprat have harnessed the power of your iPad to represent this idea of flipping pages and combining characters' clothing, faces, bodies, hats and the surrounding scenery - the ultimate aim is to find the Magician and the Witch, who form the shape of a heart once you track down the clues within the text to what they're wearing and how they look.
So rather than a standard E-Book it's more like a puzzle game. You can read all about the guests in handy little sliding snippets on one page, and then do your best to build up the different pictures of guests on another - or do what we did and just go crazy making fabulous combinations and fitting bits together.
It's probably something that I'd gauge as being more suitable for older children, because at times Charlotte struggled with the format a bit (I'm not sure what could be done to keep the original spirit of the book intact but perhaps make the navigation and sliding a bit more intuitive to use - counter-directional arrows that point one way when you're sliding the panels another way really did confuse both of us!)
It is a thing of beauty to behold though, largely due to Wayne's imaginative and unique illustrative style and the fabulous characters he creates (definitely worth dropping by his website and taking a look at his gallery of work).
"The Perfect Match" by Wayne Anderson and Inky Sprat is available on iTunes, priced at £2.99
Charlotte's best bit: Making lots of silly combinations of characters.
Daddy's Favourite bit: Slick presentation but with some tweaks needed here and there to the UI, fabulous artwork and characters though.
(Kindly sent to us for review by Manus at Inky Sprat)