Knitting-Themed Mobile Apps: Are Any of Them Worth Downloading?
I’ve been doing a lot of weeding in my garden lately, which means I sometimes get to my usual knitting time in the evenings and find my hands and arms are too tired and sore to really knit. When that happens, I usually resort to mobile games that I can poke at while resting on the couch. However, I’ve been a little bored with my usual games lately so I decided to try out a few new ones – and then stumbled on a genre of “knitting” games that I thought might be interesting to test.
Now, I don’t expect a knitting mobile app to exactly replicate the process of real-life knitting (that would probably be boring). But in the apps I tried, there was a wide variation in whether the game even knew what knitting was or was just trying to slap a knitting theme over an existing style of game. Here’s what I tried, along with separate ratings for realism and enjoyment, since those two things were not always related.
Knit Out
This was the first game that caught my eye and ended up being the most disappointing. Knit Out is one of a very common model for knitting games, where you unravel a piece of fabric onto bobbins that match the color of the yarn. The puzzle part of the game is that the bobbins are arranged in layers and you can only access a few at a time, so if you aren’t careful about the order you select you might get to, say, a strip of yellow fabric but not have any yellow bobbins accessible.
So it’s already not a knitting game, it’s an unraveling game, but as you’ll see from the below zoomed in screenshot, there’s a larger problem with calling this game KNIT Out:
Yeah, that’s woven fabric, not knit fabric.
Realism Rating: Zero knitting needles
Enjoyment Rating: Two knitting needles – it’s fine, but not particularly challenging.
Color Knitzy
I actually didn’t download this one, because for some reason, its logo made me think maybe these developers also didn’t really know what knitting was:
Yeah, hmmm, can’t imagine why I was suspicious. However, I got a look at the actual game play in an ad while playing the other games – turns out it’s the same basic game as Knit Out, but they actually make the fabric look knitted:
Realism Rating: One knitting needle (it’s still unraveling and not knitting, but at least they have the right fabric)
Enjoyment Rating: Two knitting needles – although I didn’t play it, it is literally the same game as Knit Out.
Cozy Knitting
This is a different style of game entirely – it’s a color sort game, like the games where you pour bottles of colored liquid into each other to try to get each bottle to be one solid color. Only for this game, you are unraveling and reknitting striped knitted objects into solid color ones.
This game came the closest to actual knitting as I think a game can really get. Not only are all the objects things that can actually be handknit, but as you complete levels you earn yarn to “knit” a more elaborate garment (I’m currently on some kind of jacket).
My one nitpick about the realism is they keep calling the yarn “rope,” which I have to think is a translation error (the developer appears to be based in a country where English would not be the primary language). My second nitpick is that the striped versions of the garments are far more appealing to me than the solid color ones, but I get that the game has to go the opposite way for the puzzles to work.
Realism Rating: Four knitting needles (a set of DPNs that you can manage with, even though 5 would be easier)
Enjoyment Rating: Three knitting needles – I don’t know how much longer I’m going to play this as it’s just not the type of puzzle I enjoy, but if you like color sort games, this is a very soothing one.
Wool Sort
Wool Sort is a very similar style game to Knit Out and Color Knitzy in that it involves sorting through colored bobbins in a particular order. However, there are some key differences in how the game mechanics work that make it both more realistic and more challenging a puzzle. This is the only game where I failed some levels multiple times while test playing, albeit because I was trying not to use the boosts (like a lot of these games there are boosts you can acquire by watching an ad that can save you when you hit a dead end).
The first main difference is that you aren’t unraveling in this game, you are instead adding colors to a white knitted swatch (sort of like duplicate stitch) to create an image. Now are these images something you could actually achieve with normal intarsia colorwork? Not really, but you could do it through duplicate stitch, which is what the game is showing. (Would anyone ever want to do this much duplicate stitch? Probably not.)
The second difference is that the bobbins are stacked in layers on different shaped pieces – these pieces also usually form some kind of image, although there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between the bobbin stack image and the image you end up making on the swatch for each level. In the level here, where the bobbin stack is clearly a clown face, the swatch ended up depicting a corgi.
However, unstacking these bobbins can be really tricky! The physics engine in this game is actually quite realistic, so sometimes you get all the bobbins off of a piece and it falls in a way that blocks access to other bobbins. However, if you’re quick enough when you release a piece, you can sometimes grab bobbins while the piece is swinging around that you will be blocked from when it stops. This means you have to think carefully about the optimal order for clearing the pieces, which I find a fun challenge.
The game does descend back into “we don’t really know what knitting is” by having a house you decorate with the yarn you’ve earned – which is a cute idea except you “knit” flower vases and entire sofas instead of the type of knitted decorations you could realistically find in a home. Seems like a missed opportunity, but it doesn’t detract from how much I am enjoying the actual game levels.
Realism: Three knitting needles (not quite real knitting but close)
Enjoyment: Five knitting needles – this is the one actual game I tried that I think will stay on my phone past this week.
I did do some thinking about what a “realistic” knitting game would actually look like (acknowledging that no one is really looking for 100% realism in a mobile game), and I think a change of genre might be necessary. And then this next app proved my point.
Focus Friend
I write a few weeks ahead for the blog, so this entire post had been drafted when a tech editor colleague brought Focus Friend to my attention. This is a focus/productivity app, not a game, but since it is knitting themed and currently all over my feeds, I had to talk about it.
When downloading the app I discovered this was a Hank Green project. I am a huge fan of Hank Green, his support of science education, and his insistence that businesses can be run ethically. Here’s a video of him talking about the game’s creation (and why it has no ads at all) on the day the app hit #1 in the US app store.
This app is very simple, but works really well. You set a timer and your adorable little bean knits away happily. The app cheats a bit on the animation by having him turn his back to you, but I actually appreciate that they realized how difficult it would be to realistically animate knitting motions. If you try to pick up the phone and leave the app, the bean drops all his stitches and is very sad (I did this just to test it out and I don’t think I can do it again, look at the sad little bean in the last photo!) If you complete the timer the bean knits a bunch of socks that you can then sell for decorations for his room.
I used the app to get through the very tedious task of editing a batch of photos for my fall shop collection, but where I think I will use it most is, funnily enough, for my real life crafting. I have been having a hard time really relaxing off my phone lately— I start knitting, think of something I want to look up or note down and the next thing I know I’ve been on my phone for an hour instead of knitting — so I plan to use it to encourage myself to stay off my phone a little more.
I do think it’s a little funny that the app went for socks as the lower value item instead of scarves (which are in the paid version of the app as a higher value item) given that scarves are much easier to knit; I suspect they were thinking of it in terms of amount of yarn, in which case they probably should have used hats as the base item. But that’s a very very tiny quibble, all things considered.
Realism: Five knitting needles
Enjoyment: Four knitting needles (I never want to disappoint my bean again!)
Focus Friend proves my growing theory that other styles of apps and games might be better suited to more realistic knitting themes then the games I reviewed here. I’d love to see a store management style game where you run a yarn shop or a yarn dyeing business and have to help match customers to yarn - sort of like Tiny Bookshop. I think this would appeal to knitters who don’t really want to run those types of business, they just want to play the fantasy, no-stress, gamified version.
Have you tried any of these apps, or did you find a different kind of knitting themed app that you love? Let me know in the comments!
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