Toy Mania merges fuzzy animals with Rubik's Cubes

Train Conductor and Puzzle Retreat developer The Voxel Agents has released a beta version of its latest game Toy Mania on Facebook, and is currently encouraging players to jump in and give the developers feedback.

Toy Mania is based on a prototype The Voxel Agents developed more than a year ago that recreated a giant and super complex Rubik's Cube in the Unity engine. Instead of using hands to physically twist the cube, players would use their mouse to scroll along the X and Y axes of each row of squares to form matches.

Toy Mania expands on this idea by placing players in the shoes of a toymaker, who must connect bits of fabric to create strangely-shaped stuffed animals. While the beta is being run on Facebook, Polygon recently tested an early build of the game on an iPad, and scrolling through rows of squares using the touchscreen was incredibly intuitive. If we positioned more than two squares next to each other, they would merge. When we positioned more than four squares next to each other, a toy animal would form. Tapping on the toy animal would make it disappear, raising our score. And even once an animal is created, players can still rearrange the squares to form more optimal matches.

The Toy Mania beta on Facebook is now playable here.