Apple Watch complications you unlock by playing

Most Apple Watch games end at the app. You open it, you play, you close it, and your watch goes back to looking exactly as it did.

A complication is the small tile you can add to a watch face. Any watchOS app can ship them, and a game can use them for artwork, live stats, or just a shortcut to launch itself. The interesting version is when the art is not handed to you.

These are our games, so treat the specifics as documentation rather than review.

How it works in Soar

Soar ships 19 complications. Seventeen of them are individual world tiles, one per biome, and each is its own entry in the watch face gallery.

They all start locked. Add one to your face before you have earned it and you get a plain tile, not the art. Finish every challenge in that world and the same tile starts showing its artwork, with no setting to change and nothing to re-add.

The other two are a cycling tile that rotates through whichever worlds you have already unlocked, and a circular logo that opens the game.

Two worlds, the Sunset Fields and the Desert, are free from the start. The rest sit behind either the challenges, the Royal Pass, or both.

The result is that your watch face becomes a record of how far you have flown. Somebody who has reached the Core has a different face from somebody still in the Desert, and there is no way to fake it.

Crown Jack does the same with tables

Crown Jack applies the identical idea to its felt designs. Each field is a complication, each shows a locked plate until you have earned it, and a cycling tile steps through every field you have unlocked, one per hour.

Same mechanic, different subject.

Crown Heist does something different

Crown Heist went another way. Its corner complication shows your lifetime earnings, so your face carries a running total of everything you have ever stolen, updated as you play.

Its rectangular art complications exist too, but they are gated on the Royal Pass rather than on progress. Buy the pass and they are yours immediately.

Worth being precise about, since the three games are often described as doing the same thing and they do not. Two unlock through play. One reports a number.

Why every Crown game has them

This is deliberate and it is not per-project. There is a single internal pattern document, last verified in August 2026, derived from the working setups in Crown Heist, Crown Jewels, Shut The Box and Crown Jack, and Soar was built from the same recipe.

The reason it exists is that complications are unusually easy to get wrong in ways that look identical from the outside. Three completely unrelated failures all present as “my complications are broken”: the app never appears in the gallery at all, which is a build-config problem with the app icon and not the widget code; a tile renders as a plain grey or blue shape, which is the view recipe; or the art is right but the content is stale, which is the watchOS render cache.

Every one of those cost hours the first time. Writing the pattern down once means the next game gets working complications without paying for the same lessons again, which is why a new Crown title ships with them rather than adding them later.

The thing nobody warns you about

watchOS renders complications tinted to your watch face. Your careful artwork arrives as an accented silhouette in most slots, and full colour only appears where the face supports the full-colour rendering mode.

That is watchOS behaviour rather than anything an app chooses, and it means complication art has to read as a shape first and a picture second. Art that depends on its colours to be legible turns into a grey blob on most faces.

How common is this?

We cannot tell you, and it is worth saying so rather than guessing. We counted every game on the App Store with an Apple Watch component, 4,599 of them, but the App Store exposes nothing about whether an app ships complications, let alone whether they unlock through play. There is no way to count this from outside.

What we can say is that 84% of those games have not been updated in over two years, and complications are the kind of feature that gets added in an update rather than shipped on day one.

Soar is free on the App Store.