Review: WrapSlide for iPhone and iPad

The Rubik's Cube turned 40 recently, and there's little doubt that it has been one of the most influential puzzles ever invented. Many puzzle games on the App Store compare themselves to the Cube, but in most cases that's just marketing fluff. WrapSlide, however, is a different story.

Developed by Alewyn Burger, a researcher at Stellenbosch University (South Africa), it might look like just another toroidal sliding block puzzle. But looks, in this case, are very deceiving. The movement mechanics are different from the usual ones, and produce a very challenging puzzle.

Usually, in toroidal sliding block puzzles you slide a single row or column at a time. This makes them pretty easy, because it gives a lot of freedom of movement. WrapSlide is different in a simple but clever way: the lines in each half of the board (both horizontally and vertically) all slide together. This is a significant constraint, and I can say that the experience I had when confronted with a scrambled puzzle was remarkably similar to the first time I played with a Rubik's cube.

Fixing one quadrant is rather simple, fixing a second one is trickier but still doable without advanced techniques. Doing the third quadrant without breaking up what you did before, however, is difficult, and I haven't managed to do it yet. Every time I try to use a commutator, I forget the moves I made and mess up everything.

Helpfully, the game provides different levels of difficulty to let you practice gradually. The number of colors can be 2, 3, or 4, and the size can be 4x4, 6x6, or 8x8. My suggestion is to initially practice with 3 colors.

In all modes, the game will scramble the board for you and your task is to put it back together. Note that you just need to make each quadrant the same color, it doesn't matter which one.

Additionally, for each board size there is one predefined puzzle, which you can use to compete on the leaderboards. I like that the predefined puzzles cover all settings for the number of colors, so the 4x4 one has 4 colors:

6x6 has 2 colors:

and 8x8 has 3 colors:

The latter two are not difficult to solve, but the first one currently has me stumped. I always seem to have one block out of place. I even wondered if there was some parity issue making it unsolvable, but that wouldn't be possible because it has been proven (in Dutch) that every configuration is reachable.

The author has done some research on the God's algorithm for this game. For the 4x4 size with 4 colors, every position can be reached in 12 moves or less.
For the 6x6 size, the lower bound is 20, while the upper bound is 31. For comparison, a few years ago it was proven that God's number for the Rubik's Cube is 20.

As you might have guessed, the premixed 4x4 puzzle needs all of those 12 moves. 12 moves don't seem many, but it's unlikely that a human can manage to find them. As far as I'm concerned, I'd be happy to just solve the puzzle, no matter in how many moves :-)
The premixed 6x6 puzzle needs 12 moves as well. I'm not sure about the 8x8 one.

The user interface is pretty hard to use. On the main menu there are two knobs at the bottom of the screen. Turning the left one you change the size, turning the right one you change the number of colors or select the premixed puzzle. Frankly I would have preferred some more standard buttons.

The user interface during the game is ok but could be improved. Touches are often ignored for a short while after making a move, which makes the controls feel unresponsive. Also, it would be nice to have multitouch support, so that you could use two fingers to slide all lines at once.

If you like rearrangement puzzles, definitely try this one. It has a rare elegance and simplicity, and yet it's uncompromisingly difficult.

Summary

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

©2014 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: 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.

The basic idea is that you control some blocks. You can move the blocks only horizontally, by one step at a time. The blocks are also affected by gravity, so they will fall vertically when there is nothing under them. When three or more blocks are on the same line, horizontally or vertically, they disappear. Your goal is to remove all the blocks.

The distinctive feature of this game, which also gives it its name, is the colored horizontal lines (the "membranes") that populate the puzzles. A block can only pass through a membrane if their colors are different. So in the above example, the green membrane is supporting the green blocks, while it would let the brown block pass through.

To solve this puzzle, you could move the brown block right, making it fall down above another brown block, then left to make a match; and then move the isolated green block to the left to make the second match. But that's three moves; as you can see on the top left corner, the "par" for this puzzle is just one move. How can we do that? The movement rules come to our assistance.

To move a block, the space next to it doesn't have to be empty: there can be another block there, which will be pushed. So in this case, you can move right the leftmost green block, which will push the block next to it, forming a match that will disappear. The brown block, no longer supported by the green blocks, will fall down, pass through the membrane, and land between the other two brown blocks, completing the puzzle.

But thats not all! There's a second way to solve this puzzle. Blocks can be moved even if there are other blocks on top of them. They will just slide away, while the block above them will remain where it is. So you can move the rightmost green block to the left: it will slide away from below the brown block, and go to form a match. In the meantime, the brown block, no longer supported by the block you moved, will fall down and form the second match.

Note that in the latter case the green blocks will not be removed until the brown block has finished to fall. That is, the rule is: first all blocks move as far as they can, then all the matches are removed. If the removals cause some blocks to become free, then they all move as far as they can, then all the new matches are removed, and so on until there is no more movement to be done. The order of things might seem a minor details, but in some of the puzzles you have to take full advantage of it.

There can be more than three blocks of one color on the board, and in that case you have to be careful to destroy them all at once. For example in this puzzle there are four green blocks.

If you moved the topmost green block first, you'd make a match of just three blocks, and then would be stuck because you'd have no way to remove the fourth.

The mechanics I just described are already pretty interesting, but the game also adds many variations. First of all, some blocks will float instead of falling.

The white blocks are unmovable and are just obstacles. When you move to the right the brown block with an arrow, it will go up to form a match and solve the puzzle.

Match-3 games often have explosives as power ups; in the case of Membrane, they are just part of the mechanics.

The white line around the bomb block indicates its blast radius. Moving the bomb to the right will form a line of brown blocks, which will make the bomb explode, also destroying the lonely green block.

Other special blocks destroy all blocks in the same row or column after they are matched.

Here the special block is the topmost one. If you move it right, it will make a match and then also the brown block, which is in the same column, will be destroyed.

Finally, we couldn't do without rainbow blocks.

As you can easily imagine,a rainbow block will make a match with any pair of blocks of the same color. Interestingly, rainbow blocks can't pass through any membrane of any color.

The game contains 126 puzzles, divided in three packs. You can play the puzzles in a pack in any order, but to unlock the packs after the first you need to collect a certain number of gold circles, which you earn by solving puzzles in the optimal number of moves. This will require some effort because for many of the puzzles it's easy to come up with an inefficient solution, but finding the optimal solution is a lot harder.

The quality of the puzzles is somewhat uneven. In some cases, the solution is elusive and you really need to think hard about the available options, until you get a nice a-ha! moment when you finally figure it out; other times the puzzle layout feels more like a random collection of blocks without a clear plan behind.
The puzzles that work best are the ones where all the blocks are part of the solution. Take this puzzle for example:

The brown and orange blocks are cleverly interlocked. If you move the bottom orange block, you can make a match; but then the top brown block will move up, making it impossible to form the second match. Conversely, you can easily make a match with the brown blocks, but then the orange block would fall down, again making it impossible to form the second match. The solution involves coordinated motion and reliance on the movement order I described earlier.
The green blocks, on the other hand, don't take any significant part in the solution. They are easily matched, and are not needed for anything else.

By the way, the par in the above puzzle is wrong: it can be solved in just 6 moves.

The user interface is OK, but I strongly dislike that the block colors are randomly changed every time you restart a puzzle. This is jarring and can easily make you lose track of the solution you were building in your head.

I like the premises of the visual style, but it's not polished enough. The graphics are not just lackluster, they are also confusing, for example the blast radius of the bombs is just a plain white line, which cannot be seen when the bomb is on a white background. I also don't like the asymmetry between the "normal" blocks, which fall down and have no visual markings, and the floating ones which have an up arrow on top. An idea I just had is that it might have been nice to explain the fall down/float behaviour with an underwater setting.

Anyway, the game is totally free and doesn't contain ads, so not much reason to complain. You might have to weed through some filler, but there surely are some worthy puzzles in here.

Summary

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

©2014 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 Figure for iPhone and iPad

A couple of weeks ago I tweeted about Find Figure by Art Studio Dereza. Currently I'm not updating this blog as often as I would like to, but I talk about interesting new games on Twitter first, so make sure to follow me to be up to date with puzzle games news.

I find that my mind takes particular enjoyment in puzzles that require visual-spatial ability. This tends to show in the games I develop, especially in Twin Beams, a difficult puzzle which however can be solved at ridiculously high speeds if one just looks for visual patterns. Find Figure is a lot easier, but it's also more complex than it might look at first sight.

The basic idea is that you need to connect the dots on the right side of the screen, forming a series of shapes given on the left side. This looks trivial at first:

and doesn't really get much harder adding one more shape:

but a new twist gets soon added to the mix, making things a lot more interesting. The lines you draw can intersect, and you must make use of that to create the correct shapes.

Initially, the shapes shown on the left are in scale, which helps a lot. After a while, however, they start being drawn out of scale, which adds more confusion.

When there are many dots and shapes, it can seem a bit overwhelming at first. However, at this stage even if the shapes are not in scale, they are always in the correct orientation, so you can use the angles of the sides to orient yourself.

There's an interesting additional complication, which however isn't used by the game nearly as often as it should. When you draw a matching shape on the board, it is highlighted; this doesn't mean, however, that the shape is in the correct place. Look at the top left triangle in this puzzle. You can draw it this way...

... but also this way...

... or this way! And maybe more. But only one way is correct and will allow to put all the pieces on the board. It's important to be aware of this otherwise you might get stuck on the wrong track.

Inevitably, the reassuringly correct orientation of the shapes had to go away, so after a while the game starts highlighting in yellow the pieces that need to be rotated when placed on the board (I think the tutorial message says "reversed", but they really have to be rotated).

The user interface works fine; drag from a point to another to draw a line, tap a line to erase it. Playing on iPhone, it seems that you need to be just a bit more precise than necessary, which means occasionally having to draw a line twice to have it recognized, but it's not the end of the world.

There are 100 puzzles split in 10 packs. Packs are unlocked by earning enough beads, which is slightly annoying because the beads depend on how many mistakes you make. You can easily get three beads by playing a puzzle again after finding the solution, which means you are essentially forced to play most puzzles twice for no good reason. There also an optional in-app purchase to unlock everything, in case you can't be bothered to earn the beads.

All in all, this is a puzzle game which is easy enough to be relaxing, but also difficult enough to not be boring. The enjoyment I got from it was more than worth the price of admission.

Summary

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

©2014 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: Bicolor for iPhone and iPad

Bicolor is the latest creation of 1Button, a team specializing in puzzle games with a minimalist interface. It marks a significant evolution from the style of their previous games: SEQ, ON/OFF, and PILE.

Continuing in their effort to "create applications not polluted by useless distractions", they have stripped away even color, leaving only the core puzzle elements at the center of the scene.

Bicolor is a path drawing puzzle which is somewhat reminiscent of SEQ, in the sense that the paths you create can share some cells. The mechanics are significantly different, however; more elegant and abstract, the final goal of your path drawing is to remain with an empty screen.

Above you can see a typical starting position. The numbers are what you interact with: each number represents the length of the path that must be drawn using it. You can freely move each number in the four main directions, with one requirement: that you must move it over cells of the opposite color. Additionally, you can't move over cells that already contain a number.

So for example, from the above position you can move right using the top left 3, or down using the left 2. The 1s can't be moved yet.
The numbers decrease as you move them, and they invert the color of the cells over which you move them. When they become 0 they disappear. For example I could move both 2s to end in this position:

Then the 1s:

And then the puzzle is easily completed with the remaining 3s.

In essence, moving numbers of one color you prepare a path that can be used by numbers of the opposite color.
You don't have to move a number all the way until it turns to 0, and actually in some puzzles it's probably not possible to do that: you need to move a few steps with one number, then move another number, and so on.

The solutions aren't unique and there is a lot of freedom of movement. I didn't find the puzzles to be particularly challenging, but they are enjoyable and the peculiar mechanics took a moment to get used to.

The main difficulty you could find is to avoid getting stuck in a dead end. For example it took me several attempts to figure out this puzzle:

The key here is that there are two dead ends at the sides of the big C; since the 34 needs to do a single continuous path, one of those dead ends needs to be removed by connecting it to the other numbers. This shows that logic reasoning is definitely needed: moving at random won't get you far in many cases.

The game contains 180 "handmade" levels, and the handmadeness surely shows in a few cases.

The menu you see at the top is normally hidden, and slides in when you tap the screen. It is slightly confusing because while it's open there is no indication that it obscures the top row of the play area.

The top right button is a cheat that can be bought using in-app purchases. No need to care about it.

The levels are split in 12 packs; make sure to swipe on the pack selection screen, because you can see only 4 packs at once and it isn't immediately obvious that there are more. I didn't notice a significant increase in difficulty in the later packs.

The user interface is very elegant, with smooth transitions, and the play area extending to the whole screen. I actually had a few problems with this because it's easy to open the notification center by mistake while moving to the edge of the screen.

There is an undo functionality implemented in a novel way, using a swipe gesture instead of a button. You can undo one step with a normal swipe, and a whole move with a two finger swipe. I think the single undo works ok, but the detection of the two finger undo was inconsistent and I usually had to try multiple times before it was recognized.

Among the games produced by 1Button, this is without doubt the one that I enjoyed the most. It isn't difficult, but it is elegant and relaxing, and ideal to pick up in any moment of the day. Recommended.

Summary

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

©2014 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: Hitman GO for iPhone and iPad

I don't think it had ever happened to me to be completely blown away by the aesthetics of a game as it happened for Hitman GO by Square Enix when I saw it during the TouchArcade live stream on Twitch.

After playing most of it I'd say that the puzzles are a bit on the easy side, and tend to be repetitive, but I certainly find it enjoyable enough to want to complete it (and wait for new levels to be released).

What makes Hitman GO so visually attractive is the care that has been taken to make it look like a physical board game, to the point that every scenario is depicted as an expansion pack with its own box and figures.

The levels themselves look like dioramas, depicting snapshots of daily life. There is often a cinematic intro, though I think that the swimming pool idea has been a bit abused throughout the game.

You can manually move the camera, but only by a limited amount, and it will snap back to its predetermined position as soon as you lift your finger from the screen. Even if it's only a cosmetical thing, I would surely have appreciated more freedom.

But that's too much talking about the visuals. Let's see what the puzzles are actually about.

You control the black character, your main goal is to avoid (or kill as needed) the enemy characters and reach the exit.

The action is turn based: you make a move, then all enemies make their move at the same time. If you land on a spot occupied by an enemy, you kill him; if they do the opposite, you lose. In the level above, you can see the most basic enemy type: a blue guy that just stands still and looks in a fixed direction. All you have to do is avoid passing on the spot right in front of him.

The more active yellow enemies are soon introduced, which move back and forth along a straight line.

A useful thing to note is that the enemies are totally dumb and will strictly follow their routine regardles of how you move. In particular, in the image above you can just move up and you will kill the yellow guy, even if he's looking at you. This is something that you can rarely do, however, because of parity reasons. Since both you and the enemies move by one step every turn, if the distance between you and an enemy is even (like the top right and bottom left guys in the image above), there's no way for you to land on them during your turn. Therefore, they can kill you but you can't kill them. If the distance is odd (like the top center guy) you can kill them and they can't kill you. Needless to say, the latter case is very uncommon.

There is only one way to invert the parity: using manholes, like in the puzzle below.

The manholes are the two squares on the right. During your turn, you can enter one manhole and exit from another. Since in the level above the distance between the manholes is even, this means that during your turn you move by an even number of steps instead of the usual one, and this inverts the parity. This can allow you to kill enemies that would be impossible to kill otherwise.

As said, the enemy characters are dumb and they will do just one thing, but there is an exception: from time to time you will find objects like stones that you can throw nearby to make a noise. This will alert the enemies close enough to where you threw the object: they will walk there and then resume their routine from there, which might mean patrolling a different area.

There are many more elements, which are introduced gradually throughout the game, including:

• Ferns that you can hide behind.
• Locked doors and keys to open them. An interesting side effect of opening a door is that it might affect the patrolling route of some enemies.
• Disguises. Oddly, when you wear a disguise of one color, you only fool enemies of that color. The other enemies still kill you.
• Rifles and guns to kill enemies at a distance, but also enemies carrying shields so that firing at them is ineffective!
• And of course, other kinds of enemies.

Additionally to the primary goal, each level has two secondary goals which vary, but the most common are "get the briefcase" and "finish in less than X moves". Others include "don't kill anyone" and "kill everyone". In some very rare cases you can achieve all goals in a single play, but in most cases the secondary goals are incompatible, so you'll have to play a level twice to get both. You will want to do that, because the achieved goals is used to unlock the additional scenarios.

Currently there are 5 scenarios for a total of more than 60 levels, with more promised for the future.
If you fail to unlock the scenarios through normal play, you can still unlock them using in-app purchases, and you can also buy hints that will reveal the solution of each level.

As said at the beginning, I found the puzzles a bit repetitive and easy. The new elements regularly introduced help to keep the game fresh, but the mechanics don't leave much freedom to the player. The way to the exit is usually pretty obvious, and in many cases all you have to do is move back and forth between two spots waiting for the right time to sneak past an enemy. Even the secondary goals don't add much difficulty. On the plus side, you can surely plan your solution using logic and never feel like you need to move around randomly.

If you are looking for challenging turn-based puzzles, I'd suggest to also look at Niño, but if you're happy with a mild challenge and a stellar presentation, definitely consider this game.

Summary

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

©2014 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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A Visual Catalog of Threes! Clones

If you follow gaming news, you have probably read about the big drama spurred by the developers of Threes!, who posted a detailed history of the development of their game, to show how long it took them to create it, compared to how quickly it was copied. It's a very interesting read, especially if you are a game designer, so I'd encourage everyone to take a look at it. Threes might look simple, but the process that bought to its final state was far from simple.

Threes!, released February 6th

The one thing I don't like about this story is how all the attention has been put on 2048, calling it a rip-off of Threes. This post was initially going to be about how I don't agree with that, but attempting to prove my point I turned it into a collection of real clones of Threes, so I'll focus on those for now and talk about 2048 another time.

Threes has simple mechanics, so it's easy to imitate. However, it also has excellent production quality, and that isn't easy to copy. Indeed, none of the clones matches the original. Unfortunately this isn't always obvious from the screenshots.

It's also important to note that none of the clones that I have tried faithfully replicate the mechanics. The most obvious difference is where new cards are spawned. In Threes!, new cards only appear at the end of lines that moved. In most of the clones, they can appear on any line, or even anywhere on the board. This changes the gameplay significantly.

The first clone came from China and appeared very soon, though it went largely unnoticed in the US.

聚三成塔 - 数字三消, released February 21st

Nothing happened for a while, then more clones started appearing. Sometimes changing minor things, like replacing 1 and 2 with 3 and 5, which makes absolutely no difference to the mechanics, except that it allows to piggyback on the "powers of 2" trend. The funny thing is that this clone was released before 2048 became #1 on the App Store.

Eights!, released March 12th

Apparently many people like cats, so somebody tried to use them to modify the theme. But the spirit of Captain Triad remained.

Cat Threes, released March 13th

Replacing 1 and 2 with 2 and 3 doesn't change anything either.

Slide Five, released March 18th

Some clones are more boring than others.

Threeswipe, released March 24th

I guess there's nothing wrong attempting to look like a Flash game.

Threes Free, released April 3rd

Many clones imitate the graphics style of Threes, but failing to replicate the quality of the original art.

Some go for a flat look.

Amazing Threes, released March 31st

Others keep an anonymous 3d look.

3366, released April 3rd

The most blatant ripoff to date is probably this one.

Threes Saga, released April 5th

There are ones with more creative graphics too. Doodle style, for example.

Doodle Threes, released April 3rd

Or borrowing from Pudding Monsters.

Monster Threes, released April 4th

Did I miss some? Most likely! But what's clear with all these games is that they copy very closely the mechanics, and often also the art style, of Threes!.

Next time we'll see what instead happened with 2048.



©2014 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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Update: Lazors 2.3

The beautiful Lazors has been updated again, adding a new type of block, the Portal!

The new block does what you would expect from any well behaved portal.

I particularly like what happens when light is reflected back into the portal. As with the Crystal block, the outcomes can be surprising.

You can even create seemingly closed loops... which actually aren't.

Lazors is a great puzzle game that years after its initial release doesn't cease to get better, so if you don't have it on your device yet, make sure to download it now.

The sad note is that on the very same day, somebody released a clone which seems to be little more than a reskin (and even does the same replacing of a S with a Z in the title). No link to that app! I'll just show a screenshot from the App Store description.

Make sure to avoid the copies and only download the original game.



©2014 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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