I grew up on Arkanoid. The new ones never felt the same, so we made one.
By Sara · · 4 min read
DG Reel Break · free · plays offline
I grew up breaking bricks. Handheld games with one beeping speaker, then a console, then whatever ran on the family computer — some version of Arkanoid was always within reach, and every one of them got played to death. Years later I went looking for that feeling on a phone and could not find it. The new ones look sharper and ask for more money, but not one of them felt like the game I remembered.
So Digitalgrub built one. It is called DG Reel Break, it is free, and it is on the App Store now.
A brick-breaker that thinks it is a film studio
The board is a film set. Levels are scenes, and every scene is shot in a different genre — the backdrop changes, the tagline changes, and so does the music. Romance opens with “Two hearts, one last reel.” Action follows with “No brakes, no mercy.” The status bar reads NOW SHOOTING, the ball going live is CAMERA ROLLING, and if you survive far enough the reel closes on a Premiere.
The cast you never hired
Clear a scene and the game casts somebody in it. Stella Stone in “Chrome Drive”. Kai Cruz in “Cosmic Drive”. The names, the film titles and the poster art are all generated, they come with a star rating, and they collect into a Walk of Fame that fills as you keep filming. Get to the end of the reel and the credits roll — directed by Player One.
- Eight genres on rotation — Romance, Sci-Fi, Space Epic, Adventure, Mystery, Action, Thriller, Musical. Each scene brings its own backdrop and its own tagline.
- An original score for every genre, plus impact sounds written to match: a fight hit in Action, a stinger in Thriller, a chime in Musical.
- Casting and a Walk of Fame. Clear a scene and the game casts a star for it, with a film title and a star rating, and files them into a gallery you can scroll.
- Director Mode charges as you play and buys you a burst of cinematic slow motion. Power-ups like Fireball and Grenade each carry their own colour, so you can read one mid-rally.
Nothing in it was licensed.
No film clips, no celebrity likenesses, no marketplace art, no paid plugins. Every brick, poster, actor and note of music is drawn or generated for this game. It started as a constraint — a small studio cannot licence anything — and it ended up deciding how the whole thing looks.
Built with
Godot 4.7.1 and GDScript, rendering through Metal on Godot's mobile renderer, then exported to Xcode for iPhone and iPad. Portrait-first, offline, 78 MB.
Two problems ate the most time, and neither was gameplay. Godot's official iOS export template shipped a simulator library labelled universal that in fact held only x86_64 — so simulator builds kept failing while builds on a real device were perfectly fine. The answer was to stop believing the simulator and validate on a connected iPhone. Then the game shipped silent for some players: on iOS, audio has to declare the Playback session category, or the ringer switch quietly mutes the whole game. One line, one very confusing evening.
Where it is right now
DG Reel Break 0.1.0 is live on the App Store — free, iPhone and iPad, iOS 15 or later. The version in the screenshots above, with the genre reels, the casting and the per-genre scores, went to Apple for review on 22 August. Nothing needs to be re-downloaded when it clears: it arrives as an update to the same app.
Download on the App StoreThe DG Reel Break app pageIf you grew up on these too, the useful question is not whether it looks good — it is whether it feels right. Tell us if it does not, because that is the only review that matters for a game like this one.