Review: Molicula for iPad

Molicula by Eric Wolter is a tiling puzzle that's harder than it looks, but is severely lacking in the user interface.

You have seven pentahexes, and need to tile an irregular hexagon with six of them, leaving one out.

Looking on the internet I could find many polyhex tiling puzzles, but didn't find this particular one, so as far as I can tell it's an original variation. The obvious question I have is how were the 7 pieces chosen. Also note that two of them are repeated, so out of the 22 pentahexes, you are effectively using only 5.

Update: Eric Wolter informed me that the game is a port of a physical puzzle which was sold as "Fantastic Island" or "Atom puzzle". It's patented, but the patent has expired: #4988103.
In the physical version, the puzzle pieces can also be arranged in 3D space to build tetrahedra.

While dragging a piece, you can rotate it using two finger gestures. One thing which isn't apparent at first is that you can also mirror the piece. If you move the second finger along the circular arrow, you rotate the piece; if you move the finger along the straight arrow, you flip it.

I didn't like that while you rotate the piece it snaps to 60 degrees steps. It would be more fitting for an iOS device to smoothly follow the gesture and then snap to a 60 degrees multiple only after you lift the finger.

Not being a tiling puzzle expert, I found this puzzle quite challenging. After playing for several minutes, I hadn't found a single solution. This is not bad for a puzzle that has only 7 pieces.

Unfortunately, that's literally all there is to it. There's no menus, no buttons. You get nothing more than you would get by cutting the pieces out of cardboard and playing with them on a table.

The App Store description says there are over 40 unique solutions, and challenges you to find all of them; but since the game doesn't track the solutions you found, it's impractical to do that.

At the moment, this is nothing more than a proof of concept and I find it hard to justify it being a paid app. With some improvements, it could become more interesting.

Update September 29th: Eric Wolter kindly contacted me to mention that he's planning to include many improvements in a future update. Watch this space.

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: Help Me Fly for iPhone and iPad

Help Me Fly by Funtomic is a casual puzzle game whose difficulty level pleasantly surprised me.

The primary goal of the game is to rearrange the position of the red pieces, forming a continuous path from the battery to the plane. The secondary goal is to also connect the path to the stars (the number of stars changes from puzzle to puzzle). When you solve a puzzle, you get a nice animation of the plane flying away in circles.

Normally the pieces can only be dragged around; the pieces with an arrow on them can also be rotated.

Finding a route to the plane is easy enough, but also connecting all the stars required me several attempts in many cases. The solutions are elusive, possibly also for psychological reasons. For example in the puzzle pictured above, laying down a path to either the star or the plane is trivial, but to connect both of them you always seem to be one cell short, until you figure out that you are approaching the puzzle from the wrong direction.

The game currently contains 60 puzzles, split across 4 worlds. More are promised in a future update.
While you can easily eadvance through a world by just finding the basic solution to each puzzle, to unlock the next world you do need to collect most of the stars.

The most interesting element introduced in later worlds is the energy wall. To turn off the wall, you need to connect the battery to a switch.

The nice twist is that in some cases the pieces cannot be just put in their correct position, because you need to open the wall first. So first you have to power up the switch, then rearrange the pieces while keeping the switch powered all the time.
Additionally, you don't necessarily have to open the wall to complete a puzzle. It's up to you to figure out whether you should use that extra piece to reach the switch or to find an alternate route around the wall.

Another element is the transmitter, which opens up new possibilities for different puzzles.

I found the user interface a bit unresponsive on a 4th gen iPod; also, the game occasionally crashed running out of memory. It should run better on more powerful devices. Even with those problems, I found the puzzles enjoyable and well worth the price of the game.

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: Strata for iPhone and iPad

Strata by Graveck is enjoying good success on the App Store, having reached the #1 place in the US and other countries. That's well deserved since it looks and sounds great, and it plays well. But is it a good logic puzzle?

Unfortunately, I'm afraid it's not. There is a completely mechanical way to solve all the puzzles. But let's see the rules first.

You play on a square grid. On the grid there are some colored squares.

By tapping on the empty squares along the side, you make ribbons slide over the grid. Every ribbon is placed on top of the ones already on the grid. Eventually, every cell of the grid will be covered by two orthogonal ribbons. Your goal is to make every colored square match the color of the top ribbon covering it. So one solution for the above puzzle would be this one:

Playing has a relaxing feeling, which I guess could be similar to actual weaving.

The puzzles are split across 5 sets; the first 3 are free, the other two must be unlocked using two separate in-app purchases. You can play up to 5x5 for free; one of the premium sets also has some 6x6 puzzles.


Estethically, the game is gorgeous. The graphics, the animations, the subtle sound cues, all conjure to provide an enjoyable experience. There's a very interesting article on Gamesauce about the design, which I encourage everyone to read.

The only problem is that, as said at the beginning of this review, as a logic puzzle it isn't worth much, because it can be solved mechanically.

SPOILER ALERT don't read past this line if you want to solve the puzzles yourself.


The obvious approach to the puzzles is to use the game engine to solve them backwards. That is, instead of placing the ribbons so that the squares match the color of the top ribbon, make them match the bottom one.
This is trivial to do because at every step you just have to place a ribbon over a row or column where all the uncovered squares are the same color. This is always possible, otherwise the puzzle would be unsolvable. So let's try this puzzle:

The first move would be this one...

then this...

then this...

and finally this:

There are two more ribbons to place; you can put them in any order and color since they are irrelevant to the solution.

After doing this, all you have to do is restart the puzzle, and simply repeat the moves you made, backwards. The order of the ribbons will be reversed, so what was at the bottom will be at the top, and the puzzle will be solved. No sweat.

The bottom line is that even if I knew how to solve the puzzles, I still enjoyed playing this game. This says much about how well done it is, so it might be worth a buy just for that. I wouldn't spend more money to unlock the extra sets, however.

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: 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.

When the floor moves, the balls move with it. Balls are the only objects that actually move; the square blocks, and the striped area indicating the goal, stay fixed in place.

The objective of each puzzle is to move all balls over the striped areas. Since the balls move all at the same time, you need to make use of the other objects to prevent some of them from moving in unwanted directions.

The only two additional objects I've seen are arrows, which can only be travvelled in one direction:

and odd magnet blocks, which don't allow the ball to move away from them orthogonally; it can only slide in a parallel direction.

There's about 100 puzzles in the game, split across several packs which are unlocked by earning stars during the game. Additionally, there's an extra pack which can be unlocked with an unusual form of in-app purchase: instead of simply paying for it, you are asked to go to the App Store and buy another game by the same developer.

I like that there are many small 5x5 puzzles, though there are larger ones too. The big problem is that there is no sense of progression through the game, since the difficulty of the puzzles is unpredictable. Some of the puzzles are elegantly laid out and require accurate planning, but they are intermixed with many which are quite uninteresting, not posing any challenge at all. The puzzles seem to be a completely random selection with no underlying logic.

You also have to unlock the undo/redo functionality using an in-app purchase. Since that functionality has limited usefulness in the game, I wonder why the developers bothered to add this complication.

Overall, I liked some of the puzzles, but I think they should have been selected more carefully. Blockhouse, for example, has similar mechanics but much better level design, so you might want to take a look at that one first.

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: FlowDoku for iPhone and iPad

Just when you thought that Sudoku had been beaten to death, here comes FlowDoku by HapaFive Games, which turns the concept on its head to produce an excitingly original new puzzle.

To be clear, the only thing this game shares with Sudoku is the basic premise of placing symbols on a grid so that certain requirements are met on every row, column, and box. That's pretty much the end of similarities.

In Sudoku you have 9 different symbols, which must not be repeated; in FlowDoku, you have a smaller number of symbols, some of which must be repeated a given number of times.

The second rule is the stroke of genius: the symbols that appear multiple times in a box, must be next to each other.

This second rule makes the solving strategies very different from Sudoku, and allows for a great variety of logic deductions.

At the beginning of each puzzle you have a number of givens; it goes without saying that there is only one way to fill the grid following the rules. So e.g. you need to get from this:

To this:

As you can see, graphically the givens are only slightly different from the shapes that you enter yourself. I found this a bit confusing initially, but quickly got used to it.

I was particularly impressed by how carefully the user interface has been designed. The basic way to put a symbol in an empty cell is to tap it multiple times, which makes it cycles through the available shapes. This could get tiring quickly, especially with the circle which requires 3 taps, but there is a very clever alternative way: just drag from a symbol which is already on the grid and you'll duplicate it. Cells that already contain a symbol aren't affected, so you can e.g. drag a circle to the opposite side of the grid, if the cells you slide over are empty. This works very well once you get used to it, and reduces tapping to a minimum.

There's a total of over 700 puzzles in the game; 250 can be played for free, the others can be unlocked using several different kinds of in-app purchases, including a single one which unlocks everything.
The puzzles are split across 4 sizes, and for each size they are split in packs of varying difficulty.

The size of the grid affects the type and number of symbols you have to use. Note that the circles are special because even if you have to place more than one in a box, they don't need to be next to each other like the other symbols.

12x12 is a bit too crowded for the small iPhone screen, but the controls are precise enough and, if you need to, you can zoom in on every box by holding your finger on it.

The game is very well designed. Great attention was given to many detail: it saves partial progress on every puzzle, tracks statistics, has a good tutorial that introduces the rules interactively, explains wrong moves, and so on.

Worth mentioning is a novel "roll back" function which doesn't simply undo your last move, but all the moves until your first mistake. This is a brilliant idea for this kind of logic puzzle.

Included is also a strategy guide, explaining some of the logic deductions that can be used to solve the puzzles. I encourage you to find them by yourself, however; it's a lot more fun that way. The rules are so original that they require some deductions very different from anything you might be used to.

The only issue I had with the user interface is that scrolling the lists isn't as responsive as native iOS apps: it looks like the lists scroll slower than you move your finger. But this is a minor thing and doesn't detract from the puzzle solving fun.

This is clearly one of the best logic puzzles released this year. Don't miss it.

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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