Review: RGB Express for iPhone and iPad

RGB Express is captivating from the beginning. It has cute graphics and animations, an everyday theme that can be related with, and it just feels light and joyful.

The Finnish-German developer Bad Crane has clearly been targeting the young and casual audience with this game, and I think they've been quite successful. The mechanics are deeper than a simple casual game would require, but expert puzzlers will need a lot of perseverance before getting to the interesting parts.

Review: Kuub for iPhone and iPad

Kuub by Wim Coosemans is a well designed tilt maze puzzle on the vein of Blockhouse.

Tile mazes are a well estabilished genre, and Kuub succeeds in adding new elements and ideas to keep the mechanics fresh and stimulating.

Review: Membrane for iPhone and iPad

A couple of months ago I tweeted about Membrane by Michael Stephens. I didn't find time to review it until now, which is all the more reason to follow me on Twitter so you don't lose any worthy puzzle game.

At first glance, Membrane might look like yet another clone of Move the Box, a game which I've seen copied so many times that I'm not even sure if it's an original idea itself. On closer inspection, however, Membrane has interestingly different mechanics that add a lot of depth.

Zen Garden Puzzle: Three Moves Suffice

Today it's three months since the release of my last game Zen Garden Puzzle. While financially it has been a failure, and is orders of magnitude away from recovering the development costs, it has been appreciated by players, receiving nothing but 5-star reviews on the App Store.

A few people have been engaged enough to solve hundreds of puzzles, but only a handful have reached the elusive 10th Dan achivement. To earn that achievement, you have to take advantage of one of the selling points mentioned in the App Store blurb: "no matter what you do, you will never be more than three moves away from the puzzle's only solution."

After seeing the game for the first time, most people doubt that this is actually possible. Some asked me if you need some amount of luck to be able to do so. The answer is: it's always possible, and you don't need any luck, only skill. I could provide a mathematical proof, but I don't want to be more boring than usual, so I'll just show how to solve one puzzle.

Review: Slide Boxes for iPhone and iPad

Slide Boxes by George Novozhenin is a good example of how the App Store can still provide some surprises from time to time, even if lately it seems to be completely flooded by clones of Flappy Bird and Flow Free.

The game is a very clever twist on sliding block puzzles. In this case you don't slide single pieces, but whole lines at a time. There is so much free space on the boards that one would expect the puzzles to be simple to solve, but there's a catch.

Review: Clock Day for iPhone and iPad

Clock Day by Morningtea Studios is an interesting and fun way to present something that math students might otherwise find repetitive and boring.

It doesn't look like a math puzzle from the title screen, does it? Indeed it seems colorful and inoffensive. But what's behind the facade can get quite tricky.

Review: Sushi Snake for iPhone and iPad

Sushi Snake by Benjamin Davis is a very original path finding game, featuring complex mechanics, small but challenging puzzles, and retro graphics that make my eyes hurt.

You control a snake, or more precisely a "sushi" snake. Don't ask, it's a long story.

Review: Einstein™ Enigma for iPhone and iPad

Apologies for the infrequent updates. Follow me on Twitter for more.

Einstein™ Enigma (yes, "Einstein" is a trademark) by the German BBG Entertainment is an old style sliding puzzle with a couple of new twists.

The App Store blurb boasts that the game was inspired by the Enigma machine, but don't believe that marketing fluff: it has nothing to do with that.

Review: Cube Trick for iPhone and iPad

Cube Trick by the Russian (I think!) Rutony Studio has some challenging puzzles and nice, clean graphics, but it's difficult to forgive some major shortcomings in the user interface and design.

The mechanics are similar to other games I reviewed in the past, Escapology and Move, but unfortunately here the play area is 3D. You'll soon see why that's unfortunate.

Announcement: Zen Garden Puzzle for iPhone and iPad

My new game, Zen Garden Puzzle, is now available on the App Store!

You've probably already seen the video, so let's talk in more detail about the mechanics.

Review: Move: A Brain Shifting Game for iPhone and iPad

I had high hopes in Move: A Brain Shifting Game by the Israelian Nitako.

Initially, the game seemed very fun and addictive. I played through the first 40 puzzles without even realising it. As I moved through the puzzles, however, I felt something was wrong.

Review: Escapology for iPhone and iPad

Escapology by Hyperbolic Magnetism boasts in its App Store description that it was completed in 3 days. While this is a remarkable achievement, I think that it could have benefited from a bit more time spent in design.

The basic puzzle mechanics aren't new, but the way how they are presented caught my attention.
Think of the play area as a room viewed from above. When you slide your finger across the screen, the floor slides by one step in the same direction. This is made apparent by the checkerboard tile pattern.

Review: Blockhouse for iPhone and iPad

Blockhouse is an old puzzle game by Kory Heath which was released in 2009. It's a classic, so if you missed it back then, it's not too late to check it out.
There's also a free version, Blockhouse Lite, which contains different puzzles, so it's worth getting it even if you buy the full version.

The game mechanics aren't new, and weren't new when Blockhouse was released, either. It's a tilt maze: swipe in one direction, and all blocks move in that direction until they hit something. The goal is to move every piece to a specified target position.

What makes this game stand out from the crowd, however, is variety. There are a few different kinds of puzzles, for example there are open spaces with complex polyominoes:

There are large mazes with square pieces—and being who I am, I can't restrain myself from showing the tribute to Pac-Man:

There are small, separated mazes:

And so on.

Note that just passing over the target position isn't enough: every piece must stop exactly on the target, at the same time. This requires some planning, and it's definitely unlikely to stumble on the solution by accident. Hint: it is often easier to solve the puzzles by mentally going backwards from the goal position.

Kory Heath wrote a very informative post about how he created this game. It's a goldmine of information for people interested in what it takes to make a nontrivial game. This is definitely not one of those characterless, randomly generated puzzle collections.


A great feature, unusual for tilt puzzles, is that it is impossible to get stuck in an unsolvable position. No matter what you do, it's always possible to reach the goal. This reduces stress and encourages random tinkering during the early stages of a puzzle; but you will have to use your brain to solve it.

There's only one bad part in this story: Kory Heath hasn't had time to make Blockhouse 2.
But there is still hope, I guess.

Summary

Nontrivialness	★★★★☆
Logical Reasoning	★★★★☆
User Interface	★★★★☆
Presentation	★★★★☆
Loading Time	★★★★☆
Saves Partial Progress	✔
Status Bar	✘

©2013 Nicola Salmoria. Unauthorized use and/or duplication without express and written permission is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicola Salmoria and nontrivialgames.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Review: Tile Drop for iPhone and iPad

The other day I stumbled by accident on Tile Drop, a nice free puzzle game for iPhone and iPad by Daniel Wood.

The basic idea isn't new, and actually there's an interesting story behind.
The mechanics of Tile Drop are the same of another game by the same author, Blockees.
Blockees itself was a remake of Blockee by Rob Gibson. Both games are no longer available on the App Store.
Blockee was inspired by Eliminator by Riza Purwo Nugroho, which brings us to Jakarta, Indonesia, back in 2002 at least.

This new incarnation of the game is a beautiful implementation, featuring an excellent minimalistic interface, possibly inspired by Letterpress - Word Game. Static images wouldn't do it justice so I invite you to take a look at the promo video:

As you can see the rules are simple. There's a 5x5 board containing some colored tiles.

When you swipe the screen, all tiles move in that direction until they hit the side of the screen or another tile. Black tiles don't move.
When two or more tiles of the same color touch, they disappear. Grey tiles don't disappear. The goal is to remove all coloured tiles.

And, you must do it in exactly the optimal number of moves. No discounts.

The puzzles included range from easy ones requiring just 2 moves, to very hard ones requiring 10 moves. I like how the size of the board remains fixed at 5x5 and the difficulty is only determined by the layout. Here's one requiring 10 moves.

10 moves is pretty damn hard, and I don't think logical reasoning would get us far enough. The tile layout can change a lot with every move, so it's quite difficult to keep a mental image. This is really a game that needs to be interacted with, and the experience can be almost hypnotical, furiously trying different strategies and reaching for the reset button every time they fail.
One thing to note is that the optimal solution isn't guaranteed to be unique: I've seen several puzzles that could be completed in multiple ways.

As you can see in the image above, there's an option to get hints when you are solidly stuck. They can be bought through in-app purchases, but the game also awards them liberally.

The way how you progress through the game is peculiar. After unlocking the option, you can simply generate new packs containing 10 puzzles of a given difficulty. The packs are randomly generated from a database which, according to the author, currently contains over 3,000 puzzles.

The puzzle database is actually fueled by users of the game. There's a built-in editor which is very easy to use and allows to share your creations with the other players (getting hints in return). This might actually be a weakness of the game, because there will be no quality control over the user generated puzzles, which might result in most of the puzzles being boring when compared to the ones created by the game's author.

Nevertheless, this is a solidly fun and extremely polished game, which deserves to be experienced.

Summary

Nontrivialness	★★★★☆
Logical Reasoning	★★★☆☆
User Interface	★★★★☆
Presentation	★★★★★
Loading Time	★★★★☆
Saves Partial Progress	✘
Status Bar	✘

©2013 Nicola Salmoria. Unauthorized use and/or duplication without express and written permission is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicola Salmoria and nontrivialgames.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.