Review: Fold for iPhone and iPad

Fold by Ricardo Moura is a well executed and original puzzle game, with a colorful presentation and smooth animations.

The playing area contains stripes of colored blocks. When you tap the last block of a stripe, the stripe starts shortening until it becomes only one block long.

Some blocks of different colors are connected together. When you fold one of these blocks, they pull the others with them. In the example below, tapping the yellow block will bring the three red blocks over to the left, joining the other red blocks.

The goal of each level is to end with only single blocks. To get a gold medal, there must be exactly one block of each color.

Other elements include blocks which expand instead of folding:

Grey blocks which become the color of the neighboring blocks when they are all of the same color:

And the dreaded black blocks which make all the blocks inside their area of influence become black.

The game contains 30 puzzles playable for free, and 30 more unlockable with a single in-app purchase. Most of the puzzles are easy and overall they are repetitive, not offering much of a challenge.

The only a-ha moment I had was with this puzzle:

There are two grey blocks here, that have to be turned into a single color. For example you can tap the left red block, which will make the red stripe fold to the right, turning the left grey block into green. But then what about the right grey block? Red has become a single block after the fold, so you can't move it anymore. You can tap the blue blocks above and below the gray block: this will turn it into a red block and you can finish the level, but you won't get a gold medal because you'll end with two blue blocks.

So how to get a gold medal? The solution is cunningly disguised inside the game mechanics. I won't ruin the enjoyment of discovering it yourself.

Fold is one of the most original puzzle games I've seen in some time. I just wish the puzzles were a bit more creative and required more thought. As they are, they feel a bit flat and buying the additional puzzles just offers more of the same stuff. Do try the free puzzles, however.

Update Aug 11th 2013: also see my Second Look to learn about a secret world with extra, harder, puzzles.

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.

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Strategy Guide: Stickets

Lately I've been not only playing Stickets a lot, but also thinking about it as an example of a very well designed game.

Just a few days ago, Raf Peeters was kind enough to share with me some insight about how puzzles which are enjoyable in physical form don't necessarily work as well when ported to a touch screen device. For example, a put-together puzzle like Roadblock becomes harder to play on iPhone because rotating the pieces, which is a natural motion when playing the physical version, becomes cumbersome and requires multiple taps.

Stickets doesn't have the above problem, because it was born as a digital game. It avoids the difficulty of rotating the pieces, simply by not allowing to rotate them. Everything becomes more natural that way.

The Press Kit on the developer's website lists some points about the philosophy of the game, which I quote:

• Less is more.
• Reason like a child.
• Stickets is about rhythms and patterns.

While I haven't yet figured out the "Reason like a child" part, after playing the game for some time the reference about rhythms and patterns becomes obvious. Stickets is a game that, by its very nature, rhythmically alternates moments of low tension (the board is almost empty) with moments of high tension (the board is filling up). Instinctively, one would like the board to remain empty most of the time, but this just isn't possible: you can't make matches in an empty board. To be able to remove pieces from the board, you have to let it fill up. Conversely, the board cannot remain full most of the time because, quite simply, you'd run out of options and lose.

Another important thing about the design of this game is that just 8 moves are enough to fill the board. This, coupled with the random serving of new pieces, means every few moves the board layout necessarily changes almost completely, offering different challenges every time.

But that's enough abstract talk; you're here for the strategy guide, aren't you?
Getting a good score in Stickets isn't too hard if you follow some simple rules. Here's what I came up with during my games.

1. Follow these rules religiously. A single hurried move can be fatal.
2. Never put yourself in a situation where you need a specific piece to progress. You will probably lose before getting that piece.
3. You may do a move that doesn't strictly follow these rules only if the pieces that you already have at the bottom of the screen will allow you to undo the damage done.
4. Your goal is not to complete 3-tile matches. Your goal is to avoid getting stuck. 3-tile matches are only the mean to that goal, and will come naturally as the board fills up. Never make a move only because it allows you to complete a 3-tile match.
5. Each piece you put on the board has three tiles. They are all equally important. Always make sure that all three of them end in an appropriate position. If they don't, do a different move.
6. On average, you must remove a 3-tile match every time you place a piece on the board. This means that on average, every time you put down a piece you should match the color of two neighboring tiles. That's an average and won't always be possible, so aim to match at least three neighboring tiles every time you can.
7. Avoid checkerboard patterns like the plague. It takes too long to remove them.
8. Avoid enclosing small areas that can't be filled by a piece. This includes the hole that's left after removing an I-shaped match, so prefer L-shaped matches.
9. When you make a match, don't remove it immediately. It could be extended with the following moves. This doesn't give you more points, but it allows you to remove more tiles from the board with much less effort.
10. You can drag a piece around the board and put it back at the bottom of the screen without making a move. Use this to double check the effects of a move before committing it.

I think that's about it. These rules do work, as the score of 900 in the picture above demonstrates. Now it's up to you to efficiently apply them in the game.


©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.

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Review: Bézier for iPhone and iPad

Bézier by Spiderling Studios is a physics puzzle game that looks like a physics textbook.
It was originally only for iPad, but a recent update added iPhone compatibility.

The basic idea isn't new: a ball moves on the screen, following the laws of physics. Without support, the ball would fall through the bottom of the screen, so the player must set up a path which the ball can roll on. The goal is to make the ball touch a few waypoints scattered across the screen.

I had seen similar games where you had to draw the path with your finger; in this case, however, the path is created by adjusting the control points of a Bézier curve, hence the title of the game. The Bézier curve ensures that that the lines are always smoothly curved.

The presentation is very clean and polished; the font and the drawing style look like those you could find in a physics textbook. The buttons have LEDs on their sides as if they were control switches of some laboratory apparatus.
For precise control, you can also zoom in using the pinch gesture.

The Bézier curve is not the only thing you can control: in many puzzles you'll be given other props, which play a fundamental part in the solution.

The first prop you meet is the Velocity Boost, which accelerates the ball in the direction of your choice.

Then there are bumpers, like the ones found in pinball machines.

Often times, the props you are given have a padlock next to them, meaning that they can't be moved. In some cases, even some of the curve's control points can be locked, which gives an interesting twist to the puzzles.

There's a total of 80 puzzles, split across 4 groups of 20 puzzles each.

The second group introduces portals, which open up a lot of possibilities. Don't try the infinite fall trick which you could do in the Portal video game by Valve, though: sadly, the portals disappear after you pass through them.
The puzzles containing portals tend to also contain impenetrable walls, so you need to use the portal as the only mean to get on the other side.

The third group of puzzles introduces yet another game-changing feature: switches that invert the direction of gravity when touched by the ball.

The puzzles are well designed and often require some lateral thinking to find a solution. The different props, the possibility of them to be locked in place, and the presence of walls, ensure that there is a lot of variety and different challenges to overcome.

If you get stuck, you can use the light bulb button to get a hint. Hints are very well done and, instead of giving a detailed solution, draw a sketch of the basic elements needed. They seem to be more explicit in the first few puzzles and more suggestive in the later ones.

The game also keeps track of the best time it took to solve each puzzle. That's not the time it took you to find a solution, but the time it took the ball to go through all waypoints after pressing the start button. If you are so inclined, you can try to improve your times, though at the time of writing there is no support for Game Center leaderboards.

The puzzle selection screen (on iPhone at least) isn't great: it is paged and you can see 8 puzzles at a time, but each group contains 20 puzzles, so you get only 4 puzzles in the third page. This feels odd, surely two pages with 10 puzzles each would seem to make more sense.

The other nitpick I have is that there are long fades between the screens, which make it tedious to go back from the game screen to the level selection screen.

If you like physics puzzles, Bézier is a worthy addition, with good mechanics and an impeccable presentation. A free version is also available to try it before buying the full version.

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.

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Review: Find the Mafia! for iPhone and iPad

Find the Mafia! by Experiware takes a well known problem in computer science, the maximum clique problem, and straightforwardly turns it into a puzzle game. At the moment it's more like a proof of concept than a proper game, but with some work it might become a lot more interesting.

The basic idea is: you have a group of people arranged in a circle. Some of them know each other, and are connected by a line. You need to find a group of people which all know each other. For whatever reason, the game calls this group the "mafia".

Right at the start, you are asked to set some parameters.
You can change the number of people, from 6 to 16, and the "mafia" size, from 3 to 6 (the latter is further limited by the number of people).

You can also set the number of puzzles to solve. If you complete all of them, at the end you'll be shown the total and average time. I find this a bit backwards since I won't know beforehand how many puzzles I will want to solve.
Also, it's quite odd to see the settings every time you play, and I think this is the main reason why the game looks like a prototype. It would probably make more sense to have a separate settings screen.

At the easiest setting (6,3), the solution can be spotted at first glance, and can be played by a child:

At the hardest setting (16,6), it looks like an intricate mess.

The default setting is (10,4), which seems easy enough to appeal to most people without being trivial.

One way to approach these puzzles is to simply look at the graph and attempt to "see" the solving pattern. This could be an interesting exercise, but can the solution be reached by using logic alone?

In general, the maximum clique problem is NP-complete, however we have extra information: we know the exact size of the clique, so we can use that to make some direct deductions.

Since there must be 4 people in the clique, we can start by excluding everyone that has less than three connections:

Now look at the person at the top left: he has exactly three connections, so to form a clique those three people should all be connected to each other. But they are not, so we can exclude the top left character as well.

Now the character below the last one has only two usable connections, so we can exclude him as well, and we are left with just four characters, which all know each other and are the solution to the puzzle.

Unfortunately the game doesn't allow to exclude characters, so I had to draw the crosses manually. I wish you could cycle through three states when you tap on a character (selected, excluded, unselected); this would allow for a more methodic approach, especially at the harder difficulty settings.

Is it possible to use this kind of reasoning for all puzzles? Probably not, because the puzzles are randomly generated and, according to the instructions, it's not guaranteed that the solution is unique. This is certainly something that I'd like to change: all puzzles should have a unique solution, and it would be great if the puzzles were not entirely random but selected to ensure that it's possible to reach the solution using logical deductions.

As things stand, this game is interesting for mathematically inclined people, but it feels incomplete. It's worth a look if the price drops again to free (it was a few days before this review), otherwise I'd wait for an update.

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.

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