The 10 Best Puzzle Apps of 2013

It's finally time for the big list of the best puzzle games of 2013.

I don't update this blog daily, so I "only" reviewed about 60 games this year. Among them, I tried to pick just ten which I enjoyed playing the most. I had to leave some out; that's the nature of these things.

This is a very subjective list, so your mileage will vary. Let's get started.

NB: some of these games were actually released at the end of 2012, but I reviewed them this year.

#10: Bézier

What makes this physics puzzler stand apart from the crowd is the art style. It looks like a physics textbook. The puzzles aren't very hard and they tend to seem similar to each other, but it's a pleasing experience nevertheless.

#9: Roadblock

Put together puzzles with polyomino pieces have been done to death, but this game manages to feature original mechanics, a unique solution to every puzzle, and a nice animation when you solve a puzzle.

#8: BlockPath

Playing this game is curiously addictive, but most importantly it was a revelation for me. I had never thought that it was possible to create path puzzles with a unique solution using such a small number of constraints. The ideas that spawned from this discovery were the basis for a new puzzle that I will talk about soon.

#7: FlowDoku

The reference to Flow Free is a bit forced, but the one to Sudoku is very fitting. However, while Sudoku is monotonous and ultimately boring, FlowDoku is colorful, varied, and fun.

#6: Strand

The special thing about this game is how tactile it is. It really feels as if you were stretching rubber bands, and even if most of the puzzles don't have a unique solution, they are still enjoyable to solve.

#5: Cross Blocks

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the ones that make the best games, and this one is certainly a good example. Easy to understand, challenging, and relaxing. See the strategy guide too.

#4: Sky Scramble

This is a sequential movement puzzle unlike any other I had played. Often in this kind of puzzles it seems to move pieces without a precise plan, but here it's intuitive that the solution needs to go through certain key positions, making the puzzles more approachable and rewarding.
If that weren't enough, the background images are just gorgeous.

Disclosure: I am honored to consider one of the authors of this game, Roberto Canogar, a friend of mine. He was an invaluable beta tester and motivator for my latest game Zen Garden Puzzle.

#3: Pudding Monsters

Zeptolab, need I say more? This game attracted some criticism, but the quality of the presentation is so high that it is in a completely different league from anything else I've played this year. Many of the puzzles may be simple, but if you want to find all the alternate solutions it can be quite challenging.

#2: Help Me Fly

This game is possibly the one that most successfully coupled casual gameplay with nontrivial puzzles. Disguised as a straightforward placement puzzle, some of the levels actually require to move the pieces multiple times, turning it into a sequential movement puzzle. While finding a solution is usually very simple, finding the solution which touches all stars is often very difficult.

#1: Puzzle Retreat

With its highly original mechanics, this game was an instant hit when it came out at the beginning of the year. It is relaxing but challenging, beautifully presented, there are plenty of puzzles of all difficulties, and the solution is always unique. There's nothing not to like in it. Well, apart the long loading time.



Well, that was it for this year. Don't agree with my list? Feel free to express your opinion in the comments!


©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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The Hardest Puzzle Apps of 2013

Nowadays, everyone is dumbing down their games to make them accessible to the largest number of people. However, during the past year, I still occasionally found some game which struck me as particularly hard.

I have compiled a short list of the games I consider most significant in that respect. If you are looking for a challenge, I guarantee that you will find something to sink your teeth into.

#4: Temple Trap

The first levels of this sliding block puzzle are easy (maybe even too easy) but, as you progress through the game, the difficulty rises up significantly. I find it particularly notable that the play area is just 3x3, but the peculiar mechanics allow the creation of incredibly difficult puzzles, with the hardest one requiring more than 180 moves.
Add that some levels are timed (I just skipped those), and most importantly that your progress is not saved when you quit the game, so you have to solve each puzzle in a single attempt.

#3: Stickets

I found the timed mode of this game just too hard for me. The normal mode is approachable, but is very difficult to play well, because a single mistake can be fatal. I wrote a strategy guide, which you might find useful.
The main problem is that once you become good, in theory a game could last forever. This means that to get a high score you have to invest a significant amount of time, and when you eventually lose, the thought of how long it took you to get there is a disincentive to start a new game. Thankfully, your progress is saved so you can split a game over how many sessions you like.
You get one point for each move you make. In the Game Center leaderboard, I'm #7 with 979 points. My friend Tom Cutrofello is #3 with 2541 points. The top scorer has 6124 points. Can you do better than us?

#2: MatCube

This is one of those games like the Rubik's cube, where a regular pattern is mixed up and you have to get back to it. It has several different play modes and difficulty settings; with the smallest puzzles being just 3x3, it would seem child's play, but it isn't. While I can easily solve the Rubik's cube, I can solve only the easiest mode in MatCube. From an email exchange with the author, it looks like he is in the same condition. If you discover some way to solve these puzzles, please let me know.

#1: Tile'm all

By now, you should start to see the pattern: all the games in this list seem small and innocuous, but looks can be deceptive.
I will tell you just one thing: this game contains 119 puzzles. I am stuck on #7 (I could skip it and try #8, but it's a matter of principle at this point).
It looks like a normal sliding block puzzle, but the difficulty is that when two pieces of the same color are side by side, they merge, and you have to move them as a whole from then on. So every move you make reduces your options for the next move.
The author very generously provided a hint button. The problem is that it doesn't tell you what move to make: it just lets you see the puzzle in its solved state. How to get there, is still up to you.
This game could also have made the list of best missed opportunities, because the user interface is horrible. But I'm forgiving that because the puzzles are so challenging.



So, that's all for the hardest games of 2013. Come back tomorrow for the best puzzle games of 2013.


©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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The Best Missed Opportunities of 2013

Well, 2013 is coming to an end so it's time to put together the customary end of year lists. But before reaching the usual "best of" list, I thought it would be interesting to look at things from a different perspective.

Today I'm focusing on ideas. This is a list of games which are based on very good ideas, but didn't turn out to be excellent games. They left a sour taste in my mouth because the potential is there, and with some more they could improve significantly.

Let me be clear: I'm not putting together this list to belittle these games; on the contrary, I'm doing it because I think they are worthy, and I hope that their developers will put some extra effort into them.


So let's begin.

#5: Find the Mafia!

The idea here was to take a well known problem in graph theory, give it a theme, and turn it into a puzzle game. In my review I showed how it could indeed work as a rigorous logic puzzle.
This was however left at a prototype stage, with no other way to play than by generating random puzzles.

#4: Circles

The initial idea was to take the ubiquitous toroidal sliding block puzzle and warp it into a circular shape. This didn't make much to make the puzzle interesting, but then an update was released which introduced several new play modes.
Some of the new modes turned out to be very interesting and intriguely challenging. The unplanned expansion, however, left the game feeling like a sort of mishmash, with no clear indication of what is where, and a preponderance of trivial puzzles.

#3: Perplexagon

Why waste time with match-3 games when matching 2 can be hard enough? Perplexagon adds some twists and turns (literally!) to sequential movement puzzles, producing some refreshingly unique mechanics. What lets it down is the imprecise controls and the passé art style.

#2: Willa's Walk

The logic puzzles in this game are truly excellent, but the user interface is overengineered and confusing to use. It is the heritage of a distant past, when computers were devices that only a few technically inclined people could use. Now that everybody owns a smartphone, the first rule should be make it simple.

#1: MindTilt

The trailer of this game is like a rollercoaster. So many things happen in so little time that it leaves you shaken. It's clear that the levels are full of inventive ideas.
Unfortunately, the perspective used makes it incredibly hard to simply understand what's on the screen. That, coupled with imprecise controls, eventually caused me to give up in frustration.


Come back tomorrow for another unorthodox end of year list.



©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: Sifar for iPhone and iPad

Sifar by Takahiro Sakuda is a game in the tradition of Japanese logic puzzles.

Interestingly, it would have worked as a pen and paper puzzle, and the rules are simple enough that I wondered if it had been published before, but couldn't find any prior art.

You are given a grid containing some numbers. The goal is to mark some of the cells so that the total marked cells in the row and column of each cell (excluding the cell itself) is equal to the number written in the cell.

If you were solving the puzzle on paper, you would simply circle some cells and be done with that. The game makes things a bit cleaner: when you mark a cell, it subtracts 1 from all the other cells in the same row and column, so the goal becomes ending with a 0 in every cell.

In the example above, after selecting the top left cell the grid would change to this:

Then after selecting the top right cell:

After which, selecting the middle top cell would solve the puzzle.

The game contains at least 1000 puzzle at the moment, and they vary both in size (from 3x3 to 7x7) and type, for example some numbers may be missing:

Some cells may be missing:

Some cells may be larger (and therefore and be affected by multiple rows and columns):

If that's not enough, there's even a random puzzle generator.

The rules are easy to understand and there are some good logic deductions that can be made. It's possible to lock cells in their current state, which is an essential help in the harder puzzles.
I don't think it's guaranteed that all the puzzles can be solved without guessing. I surely wasn't able to.

The user interface is overcomplicated and feels awkward, but it's ok during the normal gameplay.

The game is free (with ad banners), the puzzles are good, so definitely give it a try.

 

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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On the uniqueness of solutions

An exchange of comments in the Willa's Walk review prompted me to talk more in depth about solution uniqueness in logic puzzles, and its possible use as a shortcut while solving the puzzles.

First of all, one question which I'm often asked is: why should logic puzzles have a unique solution?

The easy answer is: why not? When you solve a crosswords puzzle, you take it for granted that there is only one valid solution. So why should logic puzzles be any different?

The more articulated answer is: because logic puzzles are puzzles that should be solvable by logic, and logic alone; no guessing should be necessary.
Solving a logic puzzle should consist of a series of logic deductions which allow you to exclude possibilities, until you are left with only one option. If the puzzle didn't have a unique solution, you would inevitably get to a point where you have two equally valid options, and you cannot choose between them, because they both lead to a different solution.

Once it is determined that a puzzle has a single solution, a question comes to mind: can one use this knowledge to make deductions and find the solution more easily?

This is a thorny issue, which I think has been well explained by Sudopedia this way:

- Sudoku axioms are constraints on the solution, given the entries (whichever these are); they are constraints the PLAYER must satisfy;
- Uniqueness is a constraint on the entries; it is a constraint the PUZZLE CREATOR must satisfy and the player may use if he trusts the puzzle creator; for the player, it is like an oracle on the puzzle.

In other words, a logic puzzle gives you a task to complete, like in Sudoku: "put numbers from 1 to 9 on the grid in such a way that each number appears exactly once in every row, column, and box." The rules don't say anything about the uniqueness of the solution, so the player shouldn't feel authorised to use that knowledge to make any deduction. However, if and only if the puzzle is well designed, it guarantees that the solution can be found using only logic deductions, and therefore the solution will be unique. If the puzzle is well designed, you can use deductions based on uniqueness, and you will reach the solution. This is a circular argument, however: if the puzzle is not well designed and has multiple solutions, the deductions based on uniqueness are invalid, and will likely lead you to a dead end.

So let's see some examples of those techniques. One I already showed in the Willa's Walk review mentioned above. Some Sudoku techniques are explained on the Hodoku site; let's see now how the same concept can be applied to Zen Garden Puzzle. Look at this position:

Can the stones circled in red be in the right position?

No, because their positions can be swapped, keeping each one in its zone and without moving the other stones:

So if the first position was part of a solution, the second one would be as well, and the solution wouldn't be unique.

How can we avoid this? One of the stones has to be moved out of the way, so that it is no longer possible to make the swap. This is done by placing the left stone in the top left corner of its zone:

This technique can be applied often, and it helps a lot in figuring out the solution quickly. I guarantee that every puzzle in Zen Garden Puzzle has a unique solution, so you are officially authorized to use it :-)

In some puzzles, the uniqueness deductions can be so powerful that they borderline into cheating. I found an excellent analysis of Hitori which I encourage you to read.

Let's now talk about a puzzle game which you surely know, since it is so popular on the App Store: Flow Free.
This game is just the classic Numberlink, or Arukone. In this logic puzzle, there is supposed to be only one rule: join the dots of the same color with lines that don't cross each other. But there's something wrong in Flow Free. Let's see one of its puzzles.

Even if this grid is large compared to easiest ones in the game, satisfying the rule is trivial and done in seconds, for example this way:

What's the problem here? That we used less than half of the available cells.

Why did that happen? Because the solution of the puzzle is not unique.

Flow Free forces you to use the whole grid, even if that's not the point of the puzzle.

So you are forced to make the lines do some uninteresting additional random twists and turns just to appease the game.

It is easy to see why it was done this way: because it makes it trivial to generate millions of puzzles that can be sold at no marginal cost. All one has to do is fill a grid with random lines, mark the endpoints, and propose that as a "puzzle". But that's not what the real puzzle is about.

The focus of Numberlink is finding the paths that connect the dots without crossing each other. That's supposed to be the hard part, and there should be only one way to do it. It's the uniqueness of the solution that implies that the paths (usually) cover the whole grid: because if they didn't, it would be possible to modify some path slightly without intersecting other paths, and the solution would no longer be unique.

Numberlink in its proper implementation is also a very special kind of logic puzzle, because its rule doesn't actually allow one to get far, so it wouldn't appear to be solvable by logic alone. But as soon as one starts to actively use uniqueness for the deductions, the puzzles become logically solvable. You should read this excellent post by +Palmer Mebane on the subject, which is enlightening. Try applying what you'll read there to some true Numberlink puzzle from janko.at, like this one: #14. It's a completely different experience from the one given by Flow Free.

To the best of my knowledge, at the moment there is no game on the App Store which implements Numberlink properly. There is a gazillion of copies of Flow Free, and a couple of original games, but they all have the "you must use all cells" rule.

Do you know of a proper Numberlink app? If so, please let me know in the comments.



©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: MindTilt for iPhone and iPad

MindTilt by MadRuse Games is a 3D puzzle game that I really wanted to like. I came back to it several times with the best intentions, but eventually I gave up.

MindTilt is a tilt maze, by which I mean that everything which isn't nailed down moves in the same direction until it hits a wall or something else. I've played a few others in the past (the best is probably still Blockhouse), but this is the first time I see one in full 3D.

The play area is a cube, which you can rotate around its three main axes. The grey cubes are fixed in place; the green cube will move according to gravity every time you turn the cube. Your goal is to move the green cube to the goal position, which is marked in red.

The one above is one of the tutorial puzzles, but it's already challenging, requiring 5 moves to solve. Even if it's in a 3D setting, this one is actually a 2D puzzle, and is solved with rotations around only one axis.

Of course, the only rotations that actually matter are the ones around the two horizontal axes. Rotating around the vertical axis is only useful to get a better view of the pieces; it won't cause anything to move, and isn't counted by the game as a move.

To rotate the cube, you need to swipe your finger vertically, as the tutorial explains. Even if the tutorial doesn't tell you, you can swipe in both directions to rotate both clockwise and counterclockwise.

When you start playing the game, the first major issue becomes apparent: gesture detection just doesn't work reliably. Many times I had to swipe multiple times, because the gesture wasn't recognised. Even worse, it is very easy to rotate the cube around the wrong axis; since there is no undo function, this means having to restart the puzzle from the beginning.

I think it is unexcusable for an iOS game to have such a bad interface. Instead of having to make a gesture and only trigger the full rotation at the end, there should be immediate feedback, with the cube starting to rotate immediately and following the finger position. This would give the user an opportunity to preview the move and cancel it if it wasn't the one they intended to make.

The other serious issue is that the isometric projection used to draw the play area makes it extremely difficult to clearly understand the position in space of the pieces. Rotating around the vertical axis helps, but movement is too restricted. Also, I don't like how you can see the green block through everything else; this ruins the perspective and confuses even more.

I didn't get far into the game because it was just too frustrating to cope with the shortcomings in the user interface. This is a shame because the official trailer shows a lot of additional content: switches, teleports, springs, mechanical arms...

I won't even talk about the unbearable background music. I had to turn it off.

The main problem of this game is accessibility. The good news is that many of the issues should probably be relatively easy to fix, if the developers wanted to address them.

 

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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Games accessibility

I just noticed a post on the blog of the Voxel Agents, authors of the excellent Puzzle Retreat, talking about what they did in the game interface to ensure that the game was playable by the largest possible audience. This earned them the GDAA's Accessibility Award.

Incidentally, I totally love how the GDAA press release that talks about the importance of accessibility is written in black over a very dark grey background, making it almost unreadable even for a normal-sighted person.

Anyway, I found interesting that many of the things mentioned in the post also apply to Zen Garden Puzzle. The lack of timers and penalties is the most obvious one, of course.

Less noticeable is the forgiveness of the detection radius. It's practically impossible to miss a stone in Zen Garden Puzzle, even playing with big thumbs on an iPhone, because the sensitive area around them is huge.

Another accessibility improvement which actually doesn't apply to Puzzle Retreat is support for multitouch. In Zen Garden Puzzle, you can drag up to five stones at the same time. Try it, you will create polyphonic music!

It wasn't really necessary to support multitouch in Zen Garden, because the game mechanics are strictly sequential. The decision to implement it came after watching my (at the time) 10-month old daughter attempting to interact with a prototype of the game. She would grab the iPod with her left hand, with the thumb sticking in front of the screen, so the thumb was stealing all input and anything she tried to do with the right hand would be ignored. Supporting multitouch avoided the problem so she could still move the blocks even if she couldn't hold the device properly.

That still wasn't enough to keep her interested in my game for more than one nanosecond, but hey, at least I tried.



©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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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.

The play area is a square grid containing a few delimited areas and an equal number of stones. The goal is to put one stone in every area.

The catch is that, while you can move the stones freely all around the screen, every time you move one stone some other stone moves by itself in the opposite direction. This is done so that this fundamental rule is respected: there is always exactly one stone in every row and every column.

After moving the stones in the rightmost two columns, here is where I was:

This is beginning to show why the game is called "Zen Garden Puzzle". When an area contains exactly one stone, it disappears and reveals that below it is a zen garden, with its characteristic rake patterns resembling water ripples. The patterns change while you play, to match the current position of the stones.

When you eventually reach the solution, the whole garden is exposed.

It is interesting to note that from every position of the stones, the solution can always be reached in no more than just 3 moves. So even if you move at random, you will never be farther away than you were at the beginning. Warning, though: solving a puzzle in 3 moves is very, very hard and requires full concentration.

As a reward, after solving a puzzle you get a quote to meditate over. In this case, it was a haiku poem by Kobayashi Issa.

Usually at this point I would say how many puzzles the game contains, but this isn't how Zen Garden Puzzle works. It focuses on providing an immersive, endless experience, so there is no puzzle list and no definite number of puzzles. Instead, after solving a puzzle, there is a seamless transition to the next one. The stones remain where you left them, but new borders are drawn around them, forming a new puzzle to solve.

The difficulty of the puzzles changes depending on your Dan rank, which will increase as you play the game. Initially, to advance to the next rank you just need to solve puzzles. Later, you also need to solve them in a limited number of moves. But don't worry: there's no penalty if you don't do that, you will just not advance to the next rank until you are ready.


In an attempt to avoid cluttering the user interface, there is no credits screen in the game, so allow me to list them here:

Design, programming and graphics by Nicola Salmoria
Merriweather font by Eben Sorkin
Marimba instrument samples by University of Iowa Electronic Music Studio
Big bell sample by Jojikiba

Last but not least, I'd like to thank the beta testers, who have been invaluable. Everything good in Zen Garden Puzzle is thanks to them; everything bad is my fault. In alphabetical order:
Roberto Canogar
Tom Cutrofello
Glenn Iba
Raf Peeters
Eric Wolter

©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: Atoms Puzzle for iPhone and iPad

It took me a while to fully grasp the rules of Atoms Puzzle by Wharf Games.

It's not that they are difficult, but to play knowledgeably it's essential to have an exact understanding of the value of each piece on the board. The game however avoids showing clear numbers, relying only on the size of the pieces.

The play area is a board containing a few discs. You control the red ones; thre green ones are fixed in position. The goal is to surround the green pieces and turn them to your side.

The size of the piece indicates its value. The smallest ones are worth 1, the largest ones 3. To capture a piece you have to surround it with enough pieces to make a total value higher than the green's value, like this:

You don't see that here, but note that a red piece can attack multiple green pieces at the same time, without splitting its power.

The important rule to keep in mind while playing is that when a green piece turns to your side, it starts attacking the neighboring pieces as if it was a red piece. This can create long chain reactions. So look at this example:

Here the red pieces have a total value of just 2+2=4. The green pieces have a total value of 3+2+1=6, so it would seem impossible to win. But all you have to do is capture the largest green piece, which will turn your side and capture the piece to its right, which will in turn capture the piece to its right:

I think the most confusing thing is that when attacked, the green pieces reduce in size to indicate how far they are from being captured. This, however, means that you lose the indication of how much the piece will be worth to attack neighbors after turning to your side. It also means that the green pieces have an additional "extra small" size, which would effectively map to a value of 0, and indicates that the total value of the red pieces surrounding them is equal to the value of the piece.

The conquer rules make me think of wargames; this similarity is made even stronger by the puzzles played on a hexagonal board.

The X in this image is a special piece which will NOT attack its neighbors after being captured.

The user interface during the game is ok. I might have liked more feedback when you pick up a piece, for example it could grow in size as if you had lifted it from the board.

It would be nice if you could drop a piece on top of another to swap them, since this is something you often have to do while solving a puzzle. Currently, to swap A dn B you have to move A out of the way, put B where A was, and finally put A where B was. Three moves instead of one.

The game contains two packs of puzzles, one on square grids and another on hexagonal grids, for a total of 115 puzzles; 30 are free, an additional 85 can be unlocked with a single in-app purchase. The puzzles in each pack must be played strictly in sequence, which I found a bit annoying.

Once you have understood the rules, solving the puzzles doesn't seem to be much of a challenge: due to how the mechanics work, it clearly pays off to give precedence to attacking the pieces that are larger and have more neighbors, and to use cells that allow to attack multiple pieces at once. The solutions come naturally without even having to think much about the exact values of the pieces. Also, I noticed that many puzzles don't even require you to use all the available pieces.

If you are looking for a more casual puzzling experience, this might be the game for you. With some improvements here and there, it could become even better.

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: Tricky Circles for iPhone and iPad

In a normal day, there can easily be a hundred new apps released in the Puzzles category. It's impossible to even check the description of them all, but I try to be as thorough as possible because often the best games come out of nowhere.

Tricky Circles by Dmitry Chalovskiy is one of such games.

After seeing the icon, I feared that it was just another clone of the boring Dots, but thankfully it's something completely different.

The tutorial isn't great in explaining what you have to do, so it took me a couple of attempts to get it.

Your task is to draw a continuous line that touches all the circles. The catch is that going from one circle to the next you'll move by the number of positions shown inside the circle.

So in the example above, you start from the left circle. It is a 1, so you move right by one position. That's a 2, so you then move right by two positions and land on the rightmost 1. Now you move left by one position and you're done. Note that it's legal to go back in the direction where you came from.

Also, you must draw the path with a single gesture. If you lift your finger and haven't solved the puzzle, you must restart from the beginning.

You can move only horizontally and vertically, not diagonally. Also, there are occasional black circles, which serve no purpose. I don't understand why they are there: they could simply be replaced by an empty space.

Mathematically, these puzzles are equivalent to searching for a Hamiltonian path in a directed graph.

I quickly solved the first few puzzles, and then got stuck on puzzle 8.

Interestingly, taking a sheet of paper and drawing the equivalent graph helped me see things more clearly. So we can probably say that the visualization of the puzzles is a way to obfuscate the structure of the graph they are derived from.

SPOILER WARNING: skip the next paragraph if you want to solve the puzzle by yourself.

The key is that the two 2 pointed to by the arrows can only be reached by the 1. Since there's no other way to reach them, one of them must be the beginning of the path. It's easy from there.

In another puzzle I found a circle that didn't lead anywhere, so it had to be the end of the path.

In general, the solving process reminds me of Disctrail, but here you have less freedom.

There are 21 free puzzles, which must be completed in sequence. With an in-app purchase you can buy 21 more puzzles, which again must be completed in sequence.

These puzzles are harder than they might seem. Definitely give this game a try.

Summary

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

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