Review: J-Fizo for iPhone and iPad

In what I hope will be the first of a long series, I'm delighted to host a review written by Roberto Canogar, one of the authors of Sky Scramble. Roberto is a mathematician and we have frequent email exchanges about our future games and puzzles in general. I can't wait to read what he has to say about this game. — Nicola

First of all, this is my first post here and I am really happy to contribute.

J-Fizo (Free) was developed by Adam Błaszkiewicz. A couple of weeks ago, Nicola tweeted about this game and compared it to my game Sky Scramble, so I had to try it! Indeed, there is some resemblance but there is a big difference: while my game is geometrical (the distances are important), in J-Fizo the game is topological (distances are not important).

Let's get into business, J-Fizo (Free) was developed by Adam Blaszkiewicz. The game presents us with a network (or graph in mathematics), and on each node of the network we have a black token or nothing at all. The links of the network are colored, and for each color there is a button.

In this game you have to move, split and join the black tokens by pressing any of the colored buttons. Your objective is to leave exactly one token on the network. When you press a colored button, the tokens move to adjacent empty nodes connected by that color. 

As an example, let's consider the three possible moves for the above position:

• If you press the RED button, the bottom-left token moves up. 
• If you press the BLUE button, the upper-right token would SPLIT and two tokens would move along the blue links to end up on the two nodes at the left side. 
• If you press the YELLOW button, the right most token would move to the central node. Note that nothing else moves or splits because tokens block each other.

One last thing, if two tokens move to the same empty node they JOIN. Actually this is the only way you can diminish the total number of tokens. So, in the above example if you press yellow the two tokens join in the center-right node and you win because there in only one token left. So the first trick you learn in this game (and the only I did learn for a long time) is that you have to look for a configuration of two links of the same color that meet at a node (in the above example the two yellow links), we will call them V-configurations. These V-configurations are a sink of tokens so to speak. But V-configurations are also the only ones that create new tokens by splitting (recall that we saw this splitting in the first example when we pressed blue).

The game concept is very interesting and original, these days this is something very valuable in my opinion. The game could not be simpler: there is basically one rule and one objective and things can get difficult with small configurations. Actually too difficult. This must be one of the most difficult games I have tried on the App store.

Let us talk about the levels. You begin with a very clear and easy Tutorial with 5 levels. Then you have the Campaign with three packs of levels: "J-Fizo's ABC" (with 26 levels), "Hexpack" (33 levels) and "Hardcore" (14 levels). But for free you can only play the first 7 levels of the ABC pack, that's it, not very much but it will take you some time to solve those bloody hard levels! Then for a unique In-App-Purchase (the Ultra-Pack $1,99) you can continue playing the rest of the levels. In any pack only two levels that haven't been solved are open to play, so basically you have to solve them in order, except you can skip one level.

The style of the game is amateur. For example, the menus are done with the default style of a very common UI element (UITableView). The playing screen is also lacking. First of all, the background image is always the same. Then there is no information about how many moves you did and how long you are taking to solve the level, but your score depends on both. Talking about buttons, you only have two, and they are difficult to press: the hint button and the restart/exit button. In my opinion "exit" and "restart" should have their own dedicated buttons, and a button to take back moves should be available since in many situations it's impossible to retrace your steps. But one nice feature is that you can drag the nodes around to a configuration you like, this makes it very clear that the distances are not important, what is important is which nodes are connected. Anyway, the UI is too barebones but at least it lets you play the game without a fuss and at the end of the day that's what you really want with a puzzle.

A more annoying problem is that the game should warn you if you get into an unwinnable configuration, the tutorial shows you one and warns that you should restart, the problem is to recognize that you are in one of those configurations. I believe I did get into them a few times, and it is very frustrating because it takes time to realize what is happening.

You can use hints, but a hint is just a clue for only one move. Since solutions of medium levels have at least 10 moves, and you are given initially 10 hints you will run out of hints very quickly, which is a shame for such a hard game. But you earn a free hint for each level you pass, and also you can buy hints with an IAP.

The game prompts you to login to facebook, this is because the leaderboards work through facebook. Sorry, but for me this is not acceptable. Game Center works well, and that should be the default scoring system in my opinion. It's a pity because I would have loved to check my score against others, I have to say.

This game has a fatal flaw. The levels are too hard too quickly. Probably this is because of a lack of play-testing. In this game you are left in the wild from the beginning. What happened to me while playing most of the first 10-12 levels was this: after making some moves I returned to the starting position and this repeated several times (as if I was lost in the desert), then I started to more or less memorize the configurations I had already visited and when some new configuration could be reached I went ahead, many times it failed, but eventually I succeeded. This is a very painstaking process. For a long time I was not learning any tricks, and couldn't find any other strategy. Then half way the ABC pack, things started to change little by little. At long last, after I had built my own toolbox of tricks the game started to make sense and I started to proceeded with a sense of purpose. Now, after solving 30 levels (with the use of the free allotted hints) I do enjoy the game.

For example, a trick that you learn is how important it is to block moves. It often occurs that you have two token that move simultaneously in different parts of the network and when you try to bring them together they move closer just in the wrong way and can do nothing, its a parity problem. Many times the way to get out of the jam is to split one of the tokens so that one side of the network is so crowded that you block moves, while the other part remains empty and the token can move. This way you break the parity problem. Another trick, which is common in puzzles and applies here, is to find a configuration from which the solution follows easily. Then take that configuration as your objective.

To make things more visual and see how difficult a level can be, I analyzed the first level of Hexpack, which looks easy.

So, I encoded the above position with a binary number: 100001. The first 1 indicates the token at 3 o'clock, the next 0 is the empty spot at 5 o'clock and I continue clockwise until the last 1 that corresponds to the token at 1 o'clock. Then I did put all binary numbers in the diagram below (click to enlarge) and where the colored arrows describe the transition from one position to the another by pressing the corresponding color while playing the game. Sometimes when you press a colored button the configuration does not change, that would correspond to an arrow beginning and ending at the same position, I did delete those circular arrows for clarity.

In the diagram below I marked with "Begining[sic]" the initial position and with "End positions"the solution positions.

(click to enlarge)

To get to the "End Positions" you have to go necessarily through any of the two "Gateways" positions, and those gateways have also just one entry each (another position). So basically you have to go through very narrow paths to solve this level, and still there are several chances of doing the "wrong" move and just loose your opportunity because you can not undo your move (although sometimes you can). If you play the level without the diagram, one would typically just go around and around through the center positions, sometimes getting close to the gateways but without even being aware of it. If you don't know how this puzzle really works, if you don't know its tricks it is difficult to solve.

So my conclusion is that this is a very interesting puzzle, with barebones UI, but ruined by a poor level design. If you are patient enough you will be rewarded. But you should take this game as a really tough challenge. I did solve the whole ABC and I feel like a hero. At the moment I have only solved 4 of the Hexpack, but I will continue. The nightmare pack makes honor to its name, I was not able to solve even one of them. If you play this game please write a comment, I am really curious.

Comments: maybe you have noticed the vertical mirror like symmetry in the diagram. It is no coincidence, for any other level you will see the same symmetry. That is, playing from position 100001 or from the complementary position 011110 will be completely equivalent. If you think about it for a while you will understand why, this is the kind of musings that mathematicians like :-)  And for the really mathematical oriented readers, I should say that this game reminds me of a mathematical object used to visually represent groups: Cayley graph. You could play this game in a Cayley graph, but tokens would never split or join, so it wouldn't be very fun.

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

©2014 Roberto Canogar. 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.

Read more »

Review: Stroke! for iPhone and iPad

It's become very difficult to browse through the daily new releases on the App Store: there are just too many apps released every day. For me, the reward is discovering, every once in a while, an indie game made with very limited resources but a good idea behind. Stroke! is one of those.

Developed by the Japanese Ryo Takanezawa, a puzzle lover who has many other puzzle apps under his belt, is one of those games that Tom Cutrofello calls "topology puzzles", and which I'd like to call "weakly constrained mazes". By that I mean that the goal of the game is to find a way through a maze where your movements are not limited by walls, but by other, less strict, rules.

In Stroke's case, the rules are that your path must go through every cell exactly once, and when you pass on a colored cell, the color must match a predetermined order. This is what it looks like:

The row of squares at the top of the screen shows the color order. The arrow is pointing at the first square because you still have to make the first move. So your first move must be either on a red cell, or on a white one. Same with the second, while the third and fourth moves must be on either a blue cell or a white one.

I had seen puzzles with similar mechanics, where some cells contain a number and you need to go through the numbers in order. One of them is called Chemin, for example, but there are many others. Stroke, however, is notable because the clues are so vague and ambiguous. I think the greatest difficulty is that you don't know where to start. Luckily, if you get stuck, you can tap the question mark and the game will tell you where to start and end, which makes things a lot more straightforward:

Of course the 2x2 example was easy, but as the size of the puzzles and the number of colors increase, they can get quite difficult to figure out.

Note that the solution to the puzzles is often not unique, which makes them a lot less interesting to my eyes. Creating this kind of puzzles without caring about solution unicity is easy: you just pick a random path, select some random cells and assign them random colors. Done. Solving such puzzles, however, is often not as fun as it could be, because you can't use logic to guide you towards the solution. You cannot say "I must make this move because there is no other way to do it", because when there are multiple solutions, there isn't only one way!

The game contains a good number of puzzles, which are arranged in a "fractal" hierarchy. That is, the first pack has 2x2=4 puzzles of size 2x2,  the second has 3x3=9 puzzles of size 3x3, and so on. I got to 5x5, I'm not sure how many more there are.

After you solve enough puzzles, the game rewards you with two more buttons on the title screen, which lead to puzzles with different rules.

The blue ones contain cells with an arrow, which point in the direction that you must exit the cell. I think this adds very little interest to the basic mechanics.

The yellow ones are a bit odd. They contain cells with a double arrow, whose effect is to swap two colors.

Initially, this seems pointless. Since you must travel through every cell, and the double arrow cell affects the whole board, the net effect is simply that you need to solve the puzzle pretending that the colors are already swapped from the beginning. This makes the puzzles more cumbersome to play, but doesn't really add anything. However, when you start having more than one double arrow on the board, things change because the order in which you pass over them changes the final order of the colors.

The user interface is quite poor. For starters, this is a iOS 7-only app, but it uses that skeuomorphic linen background, which I found a bit odd. Apart from that, the transitions, especially in the pack selection screens, are extremely slow, making it painful to navigate to the pack you want to play.

It's a tough battle, but this is possibly the most underrated game I've ever reviewed. When I tweeted about it. I was the only player on the Game Center leaderboards. There are still only nine players at the time of writing, so it can't really be called a success. While this surely isn't a masterpiece, I don't think it deserves such harsh results either. The mechanics are unusual enough to keep the puzzles interesting for a while, and they are challenging even at small sizes. Worth a try. Yes, even if it's so expensive. If you do try it, please leave a comment and let me know what you think about it.

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.

Read more »

Review: Titanic for iPhone and iPad

Titanic (also free) is a very original, hardcore logic puzzle game, a kind which nowadays is rarely seen on the App Store.

Originally released in 2012, it recently received a major update, which doubles the number of levels. But not only that: the new levels are based on a new mechanic, which turns it into a very different puzzle. So this effectively more than doubles the value of the game.

Developed by SmartGames, like their other two games Roadblock and Temple Trap, it's a digital adaptation of a clever physical puzzle with the same name.

Like most of Raf Peeters' puzzles, Titanic's theme is not just cosmetical, but it is strongly tied to the mechanics.

The setup is a shipwreck. There are passengers in the water, and lifeboats that must pick them up. In the first few puzzles there is plenty of space, so navigating around seems easy, however the strict movement rules make it more difficult.

The first rule is that to pick up a passenger, a boat must be placed in such a way that the passenger is beside the boat's seat. As you can see, the boats above are two units long, but they have only one seat. Additionally, the boats can move in all directions, but they cannot rotate. This means that the boat at the top cannot pick up the passenger in the bottom left corner, because there's no way to get him next to the seat.

You'd therefore be tempted to move the other boat to the left and pick up that man. Unfortunately, that's prevented by the second rule: when passengers can climb on a boat, they must do it. You cannot pass by them and not pick them up. So as you moved the boat to the left, you'd pass next to the right passenger, and would be forced to pick him up.

Things get quickly more crammed up, with more boats and passengers populating the board. In this puzzle there are three boats, and it's pretty clear by exclusion which passenger should be picked by each, but it's not that simple.

You can't simply move the bottom boat to pick up a passenger, then move it out of the way to be able to pick up the other one, because there's a third rule which prevents that: when a boat is full, it drops anchor and cannot be moved again. So you would end up in this position, with no way to pick up the passenger on the left.

This rule is crucial to the game balance. At the beginning, the passengers in the water limit the movement possibilities; as you pick them up, they free up space, which can be used to make moves which were impossible before. This is perfectly exemplified in the puzzle above, where one of the passengers cannot be saved until you get another one out of the way.

If the boats continued to move freely after being loaded, the puzzles would become too easy after saving a couple of passengers. With the boats forming new barriers, instead, things remain interesting until the end. This restriction is made a bit less limiting by the presence of boats that can carry two passengers. In that case, the boat can save a single passenger and keep moving until it is fully loaded.

This process of moves becoming more limited as you proceed reminds me of an exceptionally hard puzzle game, Tile'm all, though in that case things are made even harder by the fact that no more space frees up as you move.

But don't worry, because the board can be very crowded anyway. There's remarkably little free space in the hardest puzzles, which makes it somewhat surprising that a solution even exists.

There's an additional rule, which I don't particularly like. In some cases, you can move a boat in such a way that it could load more than one passenger on the same seat. In that case, you have to choose which one to pick up, as indicated here by the ring buoys.

I think that this makes the rules less "clean", and I might have preferred if the puzzles were designed to make this occurrence not possible. However, given how crowded the board can be, this was probably just not possible.

What I described up to now are the rules of the standard Titanic game. As I said at the beginning, the update recently released adds a new mechanic. Consistently with the game's theme, the new elements are iceberges.

Ice blocks can be moved, but not directly: they can only be pushed by the boats. For example, in the puzzle above the three blocks near the top are isolating a passenger, so you need to push them out of the way, while being careful to not pick up the right passenger ahead of time. The new element works very well with the theme, and does a good job of mixing the classic rules with sokoban. Note that, unlike sokoban, you can push multiple blocks at the same time.

The paid version contains 204 puzzles, which can be played in any order. The free version generously contains 42 puzzles. You'll want to take advantage of the ability to play out of sequence, because the "iceberg" and "classic" puzzles are in separate groups, but alternating between the two helps keeping the gameplay more varied.

What distinguishes this game from the average puzzle game on the App Store is the complexity of the rules. It's not that they are outrageously complicated, but they need attention and it's easy to get confused the first few times you play. It is even more surprising that this was born as a physical game: I can imagine people making mistakes and forgetting to pick up a passenger. The nice thing about the digital version is that it keeps track of the rules for you.

These are also not the kind of puzzles where you can play but just moving around carelessly. You need to think from the very beginning, because a wrong move will leave you blocked. Basic logic will help immensely, especially in the easier puzzles, because you can rule out all the impossible and remain with a handful (possibly just one) of options to try. The harder puzzles do seem a bit overwhelming.

The graphics are nice. The water in the background is not animated, but everything else is; the boats gently rock, and the passengers turn to follow the movement of the boat you are interacting with. Sound effects are sparse but adequate.

Input handling could be better: the boats can only move on a straight line, so if you want to move on a L shaped path, you have to make the first part of the move, release the finger, then drag again on the second part.

The tutorial section could be improved. It has many pages of text, followed by a couple of interactive sections which don't really add much. It would benefit from being interactive from the start, and could probably omit some details, like the fact that boats cannot move diagonally.

I can certainly recommend this game, along with all the other SmartGames. As I've said other times in the past, my only regret is that there aren't more of them on the App Store.

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.

Read more »

Review: SpinIn for iPhone and iPad

SpinIn (also for iPad) by Klogia is a new release but looks old—and for good reason.

Confused by the splash screen? Well, don't worry. The actual game looks nothing like that. Actually, there is no "Spin" mechanic at all! Instead, it's a "Tilt" maze.

I've reviewed other tilt mazes in the past, so you know the drill. You can move in any direction, but when you do, all the pieces move in the same direction until they hit a wall. The goal is to make the block with a jewel on top go out from the side.

What makes this game apart is that the puzzles are very compact, never more than 5x4, and use a small number of pieces, usually just three. Despite that, they are challenging and rewarding. Often times I played carelessly for a while, getting nowhere. Then I stopped to think and had a good "a-ha!" moment as I figured out the trick needed. This is a perfect example of how this kind of puzzles should be designed.

Note that all the pieces can be removed, not just the jewel one. This is actually needed in some of the puzzles, like the above one.
Of course the L-shaped pieces cannot be completely removed, but they can go out partially, which is a key part in many of the puzzles, like this one:

On the other hand, the fact that you can remove a piece doesn't mean that you should: for example to sove this puzzle you need the green block to remain on the board.

What I just said indicates that, unlike Blockhouse, you can get stuck in an unwinnable state, so you need to be careful about what you do, and restart (or undo) if needed.

As I said in my earlier tweet, this game was a pleasant surprise in the sea of clones that are currently devastating the App Store. However, it isn't really a new game: it was originally released in 2010.
Some time ago it was removed from the App Store, and now it's back with a refurbished interface, new puzzles (I think), and updated with some free-to-play mechanics.

The graphics really look outdated. All those textures and skeuomorphism make everything look heavy and overcomplicated. Ironically, if you look at Tom Cutrofello's review of the original version, the graphics were less refined but a lot clearer.

The user interface is terrible. It's confusing, difficult to navigate and interact with. There are just too many options!

Input handling during the game is ok, but there is an area at the bottom of the screen which is used for the undo functionality and often gets in the way.

There's a total of 132 puzzles, which must be solved strictly in order, unless you want to pay to skip one.

The most ridiculous thing is how a free-to-play timer has been added to the puzzle progression. After solving the first 24 puzzles, you have to wait 90 minutes before unlocking the next puzzles, or you can pay $0.99 and unlock them right away. Frankly I don't think this kind of mechanic can work in a game like this: the best thing it can accomplish is turn people away.

Get this game for the good puzzles. However, it would probably benefit from a complete redesign of the user interface and presentation.

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.

Read more »

Perfect Paths: Score 900 in Andromeda

A few people asked me: how can you score 900 in the Andromeda levels of Perfect Paths? They are simple puzzles, with an apparently obvious solutions; there doesn't seem to be much freedom in order to gain extra points. But on closer inspection, you can.

If you follow me on Twitter, you should have seen a retweet about a blog which shows solutions for (almost) all the levels in the game. Of course you'll not want to spoil the game by peeking at solutions, but if you're seriously stuck, this will get you going. Even if you do copy a solution, there's still a lot of fun to be had by making it better and shorter to earn extra points.

I already gave a few tips in my review of the game, but let's look at those again with specific examples.

The solution to the above puzzle seems obvious: just draw straight paths to the goals and be done with it. However, this is inefficient. The score you get depends on only two things: the number of arrows you use, and the number of steps taken by the solution. In the above case, the number of arrows is optimal: you can't do better than that. However, the order of the arrows is not optimal.

The blocks move following a 4-phase rhythm: UP, DOWN, RIGHT, LEFT. When for example you have two UP arrows one after the other, followed by a RIGHT arrow, this requires 7 steps: the block goes UP, then it stays still during the DOWN, RIGHT, LEFT phases, then it goes UP again, stays still during DOWN, finally goes RIGHT. So 4 steps are "wasted".
If instead the order of the arrows is UP, RIGHT, UP, the block ends in the same position as before, but in only 5 steps: goes UP, stays still during DOWN, goes RIGHT, stays still during LEFT, and finally goes UP. So you save 2 steps, potentially worth 2 extra points. Which is what happens if you change the solution to this one:

I said potentially, because the only thing that matters is how long it takes for the last block to reach the goal. If in a puzzle there are two blocks, and one of them does a very short path while the other takes a longer route, it doesn't matter how short the first path is. It's better to keep the paths balanced and make the blocks reach the goal at about the same time. Look at this for example:

Here the yellow block does an optimal path, but the blue block goes all over the place. It's possible to do better than this.

And to do really well in this level you have to take advantage of the most important element of the game: the ability to join and split blocks. Joining blocks is a major advantage because it allows you to move multiple blocks with a single command, saving on the number of arrows; but more importantly, it allows you to do things that are simply not possible for blocks moving alone. Look at this:

Here the two blocks will join, move together to the left, split; then the yellow block goes up pushing the blue one into its goal, and finally move to its goal. This solution is both more compact and shorter of the previous one, giving 13 extra points.

If you follow all these directions, you should easily be able to beat Andromeda with the remarkable score of... 899. That final extra point to reach 900 is still up to you. Try to find a different solution for the last puzzle which still uses joins and splits, but needs one less arrow.

See you on the leaderboards!


©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.

Read more »

Update: Qvoid 1.8

What a nice surprise! The best cube rolling puzzle game on the App Store, Qvoid, has just been updated, adding 20 new puzzles.

The new puzzles are elegantly small and challenging, as usual for this game. Here is the first one.

My first attempt? 63 steps. Second attempt? 59 steps. The creator's? 13 steps. Classic.

Having new puzzles would be enough to rejoice, but this update does more: it also adds a new cell type!

You need to enter these new cells following the direction of the arrow. You can then leave the cell in any direction. This allows to make some nice compact puzzles like this one, which took me a while to solve (also because I had forgotten what the white cells do...)

It's great to see this beautiful game still updated from time to time, years after its initial release. I can only expect that more updates will come out in the future, further extending the use of the new cell type.


©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.

Read more »

Review: Perfect Paths for iPhone and iPad

Hyperbolic Magnetism, in the person of Jan Split Ilavsky, surely knows how to make puzzle games that stand out from the crowd. Perfect Paths is his best so far.

Perfect Paths is based on the previous Trappped, an iPad-only game which I think was let down by the layout of the user interface. While they share the basic mechanics, everything else has been improved so much that it can be considered a wholly new game.

Since the launch of Threes, I've seen more and more developers make animated gifs to showcase their game, which is great because it makes it so much easier to explain what the game is about. So here is Perfect Paths in all its glory:

If you feel a bit overwhelmed, that's fine: the mechanics are complex. The game does a good job of introducing the concepts one at a time, so let's start from the beginning.

Your goal is to bring the blocks over the circles of the same color. To do that, you use arrows. You draw the whole path in advance, then when you are satisfied tap the play button. The blocks then start dancing an elaborate dance, underlined by very appropriate sound effects and elegant animations. It's fun to watch just for that, even if your plan fails, as will happen most of the time.

The immediate comparison that springs to mind is the classic Trainyard. That is, however, a very different game; in many ways, easier and more intuitive. The key concept of Trainyard is the railroad switches which toggle every time a train passes through them. Once you understand how those work, you can do pretty much anything, and solving the puzzles is mostly a matter of adjusting the initial position of the switches.

Parfect Paths, however, has nothing like that. Once you set an arrow, every block that passes through that cell will go in the same direction; you can't make one block turn left and the next one turn right. The only slight exception to this is crossroads, shown as diamonds on the board.

When a block passes through a crossroad, it just goes straight through it. This allows the paths to intersect, but there's not much else you can do without the other mechanics.

One important limitation is that you cannot put arrows on the goal squares (which makes sense because otherwise after reaching the goal the block would be sent away!) nor on the dashed squares. This creates configurations like the following one where some goals are apparently unreachable.

The solution to this is to use one block to push another. If you line up the blocks vertically so that the yellow one is on top and the red one is below it, when the red block moves up it will push the yellow one, and they can both reach their goals at the same time.

The extension of pushing is the other weapon you have at your disposal: by placing on the board the chain symbols that you can see at the bottom left of the screen, you can join blocks, so that when one of them moves the other will move together with it. Using this possibility can also be a requirement of the puzzles, like in this one, where the white lines between some of the goals indicate that the blocks over those cells must be joined (and note that like with arrows, you can't simply put a chain command over a goal cell).

The other two icons you can see at the bottom are the inverse command: they let you separate blocks which had previously been joined.

If you have been following carefully, you might have wondered about a possible loophole in the rules: what should happen if two blocks are joined and they are on two arrows with conflicting directions, e.g. one up and one down? Which direction should they go?

The answer lies in the most subtle element of the game: the phase timeline. The arrows are not all active at the same time: instead, one direction is processed at a time. After you tap the play button, you can see the phase timeline scroll at the bottom of the screen, showing the order of things: first UP, then DOWN, then RIGHT, then LEFT.

When the blocks start pushing and linking, the phase order becomes very important to make things work as you want, and can lead to unexpected results.

As you can see, the game's rules are surprisingly deep, and despite all the efforts that have been made to give it a gentle learning curve, the mechanics can take a while to get used to, especially if you have played Trainyard. You need a completely different mindset to solve these puzzles; the lack of control over the arrows can be extremely frustrating until something finally "clicks" in your head. I have to say that I was stuck on the Alpha Pegasus level for a long time before getting it. (Hint: remember what you did in the Cassiopeia levels).

I liked the premises and the style of one of the Jan's previous games, Escapology (developed with Vladimir Hrincar), though I marked it down in my review for having many puzzles but of erratic quality. It has to be said, however, that since then I haven't found any better game with similar mechanics.

Perfect Paths, if anything, has the opposite problem, being a bit light on content. I was lucky enough to play a beta version of the game, and I've already solved all the puzzles. However, the pack selection screen shows a couple of important things.

The first one is the promise of new puzzles to be released every week. This will be done using app updates, so if the author can keep his promise, this will be an absolutely great and novel way to keep players engaged over time without flooding them with annoying push notifications. While a few games have provided content updates from time to time, I think this would be the first time it would be done so frequently.

The second important thing on that screen is how prominently the Game Center leaderboards are displayed. They are right there on the same screen as the puzzles, instead of being tucked away inside the standard Game Center pages. This is useful because the solutions to the puzzles are totally open to your creativity, and the game doesn't provide any reference to judge how good they are, so comparing with other players is the only way to put them in context.

It is a testament to the quality of the game that despite having solved all the puzzles, I keep coming back to it attempting to further improve my score. The name Perfect Paths is very fitting, because for a programmer's mind like mine, just finding a solution isn't enough: you want it to be the best one possible, and compete on the leaderboards to prove it. Which isn't that easy if one of your friends is Federico Prat Villar.

The user interface works fine, though I found the erase button to work a bit counterintuitively and require too many taps to correct your path. Also, since most of the playing time is spent looking for optimisations, I wish the puzzle list showed thumbnails (to find quickly the puzzle you think you can improve) and there was a quick way to move to the prev/next puzzle instead of going through the puzzle list every time.I also wish that the back button had a bit larger hit area because it's difficult to tap it when the iPad is inside a case covering part of the bezel.

If you want to try and improve your leaderboard standings, let me spend a few words on how the scoring works. There are only two things that affect the score: the number of arrows you use, and how many steps it takes for the solution to run. In both cases, the less, the better.

Optimizing the first parameter is obvious: just try to use as less arrows as possible. A nice thing is that after being introduced to the advanced mechanics later in the game, you can go back to the first few levels, which you solved naively, and try to improve them using the new elements at your disposal. So do use those combinators in Andromeda!

Optimizing the solution run time is subtler. Clearly, a shorter path should be quicker. However, because of the phase timeline, blocks are slow to travel in a straight direction: 4 phases (up, down, right, left) need to pass between one move and the next. So for example if you need to move 2 cells up and 2 cells right, doing UP, UP, RIGHT, RIGHT isn't the fastest option: it needs 1+4+2+4=11 steps.  If you do UP, RIGHT, UP, RIGHT instead, you need only 1+2+2+2=7 steps.

It's important to note that you get a lot of points for just solving the puzzles, while what you get for optimizing them is peanuts in comparison. When you look at the leaderboards, a difference of just one point means a lot more than it seems.

Without a doubt this is one of the best puzzle games of the year, and it promises to only get better over time, so stop wasting time and go buy it. And beat my score if you can :-)

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.

Read more »

Review: Kuub for iPhone and iPad

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

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

The basic goal is to bring the blocks, which move at your command, over the circles, which don't move. You can move in any direction, but when you do, all blocks move in that direction and travel until they hit an obstacle. Note that the goals are obstacles too, for blocks of a different color. When a block touches its goal, the block disappears.

Unlike Blockhouse, you don't have to bring all the blocks over their goal position at the same time; in most cases you wouldn't be able even if you wanted to.

The recurring elements of most of the puzzles are the gray, neutral blocks. They move like the other blocks, but don't have a goal and are only there to act as moving obstacles.

You might have noticed that every puzzle has a title, shown in the top left corner. This is a nice touch and increases the perceived quality of the puzzles.

The neutral blocks can be larger than 1x1, something which is used to great effect in many of the puzzles.

My favorite element is force fields. Those are squares that can only be crossed by blocks of the same color. I liked the similar feature in Membrane, but in this game it's used to even grater effect. I particularly liked this puzzle, which makes good use of the force fields peculiarities.

The game has bombs too, but luckily not of the exploding kind. They are really just a way to make the goal slightly different, since in this case you have two moving blocks instead of a moving block and a fixed goal; but when you make them touch, they just disappear without destroying what's nearby.

In some puzzles you can also combine blocks to change their color. You need to be careful not to combine the wrong blocks.

The final element is magnets. Those are cells that temporarily stop a block which passes over them, but only if it's of the same color.

As an aside, the position shown above seems unwinnable to me. In some cases the game warns you when that happens (as in the color merging example shown earlier), but it looks like it doesn't always do that. So be careful and restart the puzzle if you think you are stuck.

There's a total of 72 puzzles, split in 6 chapters; you have to solve the levels in each chapter in sequence, but the chapters are all unlocked from the beginning.

The level design is good and varied. I didn't find most of them particularly challenging, but in many cases you really need to think and use logic to plan a strategy, otherwise you'll get nowhere.

The graphics are nice too, which isn't all that common in this kind of games. The major shortcoming is the lack of Game Center integration. Since the game keeps track of your total number of moves, it would be nice to compare with other people. Hopefully this will be fixed soon!

This is an enjoyable puzzle game, which is fun to play and doesn't get boring thanks to the varied mechanics. Certainly 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.

Read more »