Review: The Weaver for iPhone and iPad

The other day I noticed the polished icon of The Weaver among the new releases, and I was thrilled to see that it was developed by the Portuguese Pyrosphere.

Pyrosphere might not be as well known as other big names in the industry, but I think it is one of the best developers of puzzle games in the world. I've reviewed other great games by them in the past: Lazors, Chess Light, and Bloom Box.

I wasn't disappointed; The Weaver is excellent, and I couldn't stop playing until I had almost finished it.

There is a remarkable number of ribbon-weaving puzzle games: clearly it has something that appeals to our playful side. I reviewed TAPES just last week, but the obvious precursor of this game is Strata  In my review, I criticized Strata because it was possible to solve all its puzzles using a mechanical procedure. I'm glad to say that while The Weaver looks remarkably similar at first glance, it doesn't have a similar weakness.

The play area consists of a few colored ribbons entering from above. Their paths are blocked by colored squares; your objective is to route the ribbons in such a way that each ribbon exits the screen passing over a square of the same color.

One move consists of tapping one of the intersections. That folds the two ribbons passing there, making them go in the opposite direction. For example here my first move is on the blue and green ribbons, which produces this result:

The blue ribbon was able to exit the screen because it's now passing over a blue square.

Note that the fold only happens along a vertical line: this means that the ribbons always enter from the top, change direction a number of times, and exit from the bottom. You cannot send a ribbon back to the top. This fact can be used for many logic deductions.
For example in the position above if I let the green ribbon go over the red one, there's no way to make it climb back to the green exit. Therefore, I must put a fold on the red/green intersection, like this:

And with a final move, the puzzle is solved.

In this case the solution was unique, but in general the puzzles can be solved in multiple ways. The number of stars you get depends on how many folds you did. Note that you can do as many moves as you want while solving the puzzle; the only thing that matters is how many folds are left at the end.

I haven't verified this, but knowing the quality of Pyrosphere's puzzles I'm pretty sure that every puzzle has only one 3-star solution.

As you progress through the game, there are no additional mechanics: the only things that change are the sizes of the puzzles (which aren't necessarily square), and the number of colors shown on each exit. Interestingly, having more options on each exit actually makes the puzzles harder, not easier, because it adds uncertainty, and the optimal solution is only one.

But there are logic deductions that can be applied to this additional uncertainty, too. For example in the above puzzle there is only one purple ribbon, which must exit from the bottom left. All the other purple exits are just decoys that can be ignored.

Things get more and more complicated and in the later puzzles it becomes difficult to solve the puzzles solely through logic; like in Lazors, you have to also rely on intuition and experimentation.

Often times, you can reach a suboptimal solution rather quickly but then have to spend a lot more time improving it if you want to get three stars.

One thing to note is that, unlike in other games, in this one the ribbon metaphor wouldn't be really needed. Instead of ribbons, you could have had light beams and vertical mirrors: the effect on the puzzle mechanics would have been identical.

However, it wouldn't have been nearly as fun: the use of ribbons is a major element in the appeal of this game. The way how the animate as you make your moves is relaxing and almost hypnotic. I think this game is a perfect application of a game design principle well explained by Ted Brown in an article I read some time ago:

Give [your players] a clear goal, give them a simple way to achieve that goal, give them fantastic feedback, and stop there. It might be enough.

I'd also like to mention that while I've been growing used to recent games running poorly on my old 4th Gen iPod Touch, this one runs beautifully. So don't waste any more time and go download this little treasure.

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: TAPES for iPhone and iPad

I like discovering good puzzle games that might be overlooked by most people. TAPES by Yohei Sato, a brilliant game with a user interface mostly in Japanese, is certainly one of them.
People that follow me on Twitter knew it first; now let's talk about this little gem in more detail.

It's no mystery that I like path finding puzzles. BlockPath, for example, made into my list of the 10 best puzzle games of 2013. I have been even developing one of my own in the past months—though that project is currently on hold.

I thought I had seen everything about this concept. I was amazed, then, to be totally surprised by the rules of TAPES.

The game begins in the easiest way. Start from the dot and fill the grid. Piece of cake.

But soon, something different happens: unlike most other similar puzzles, the paths can instersect. So from here...

... you need to do this.

There is a subtlety in the rules: two paths can go over the same cell only if they pass straight through it, crossing each other. When a path makes a turn on a cell, no other pass can use that cell. So in the above case, it wouldn't be possible to go down with the green path and right with the blue one.

The other surprise is that a path can intersect itself, and this is often required to solve the puzzles. Look at this one for example:

there's no way you would be able to fill the grid without going through the same cell twice. Allowing that, the solution is still unique.

Did you notice that there is a number inside the dots? That's the final brilliant rule. The number indicates over how many more cells the path must pass before filling the board; not one more and not one less. Look at this for example:

It would be trivial to fill the grid doing an obvious path, but you'd end in this position:

That's not a solution because you still have 4 more cells to go over. To use those extra cells, you need to make the path intersect itself.

These rules work perfectly to produce delightfully enjoyable puzzles; 108 of them, in the current version. Most of them are not too hard, but they are very fun, and I think that a major reason for that is because the solutions are simply beautiful to look at; I've talked about "paths" so far, but as you have seen, the game represents them as ribbons, which is a perfect metaphor for the rules.

When you solve a puzzle it scrolls away automatically, but you can pull down the screen to look again at the pattern you just created; something that I've done more than once. I think it would have been more rewarding to give full relevance to the solutions and let the player move on when they want.

The puzzles can be surprisingly challenging to solve. The rules controlling the intersections require a different approach from many similar concepts. You can also use a good amount of logic: for example the cells where a path must end are often obvious, and you can use reasonings about parity to rule out certain combinations.

My main regret with this game is that the user interface is not as good as it could be. Drawing the paths is not very smooth, because if you don't move your finger very precisely it's easy to leave the dots behind. Additionally, I would have liked to simply tap a cell in the middle of a path to erase the rest of it and start drawing a new one. Instead, the only way to erase a path is by drawing it backwards, which can get tedious when the path is long.

But those are minor inconveniences when compared to the fun I had. Highly 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: Go To Gold for iPhone and iPad

What drew me to Go To Gold by Timur Nigmetzianov was its very nice graphics. I didn't expect that the puzzles would be even better.

I downloaded this game while it was free for a day, and promptly tweeted about it. Make sure to follow me to not lose these opportunities!

Go To Gold is based on the classic Sokoban puzzle, so it doesn't need many explanations. It has however some aces up its sleeve in terms of originality.

But first, the basic rules, in case you don't know them. Your goal is to move some blocks to the indicated positions on the board. You can move the blocks only by pushing them, not pulling; and you can push only one block at a time.

The first level helps getting acquainted with the mechanics and controls, but it also shows what this game is not: it is not one of those games that hold the player by their hand with an endless series of trivial puzzles at the beginning, fearful to scare away the less confident players.

No, here we start with a puzzle which, while very easy, still requires a fair amount of work.

And then the second level already requires a lot more work. At this point, I was already hooked.

What I like about the selection of puzzles in this game is that they are compact, don't contain many objects, but they are very satisfying to play. There aren't many levels in total—they are 64 divided in four groups of 16—but each one provides its own challenge, and after playing the game for a week I'm still fighting through it. Most of the levels are requiring me multiple sittings, because I just can't figure them out. The a-ha! moments when I finally see how it's possible to navigate around the seemingly impossible position are some of the best ones I've experienced in a while.

I found logic to be very useful in approaching these puzzles. The tight spaces mean that there is very little freedom of movement, and in most cases even getting a block on its goal and out of the way doesn't make things any easier. It helps to think backwards from the goal position: there is often only one way to push a block onto a goal tile, which gives valuable hints on what needs to be done before.

I would be happy just having this kind of puzzles for the whole game, because they are that good. But the author has done more: there are four different settings, with slightly different rules.

In the second group, the blocks are colored, and each one needs to go to the goal of the same color.

In the third group, there are no clear goal positions. Instead, your objective is to use some mirrors to reflect a beam of light and make it hit a certain block.

In the last group, there are colored walls which need to be lowered by pushing blocks over the corresponding colored buttons.

Also, extra points for making all levels playable from the start. No frustration if you get stuck on a level: just try another one.

As can be seen from the screenshots, the graphics are very well done. The animations are very good too, and the music is on the same level. This is really an excellent presentation, possibly the best I've seen for a Sokoban game.

My initial reaction to the controls was that your man moves a bit too slow, and it's tiring to have to swipe for every step.
In Sokoban puzzles, how you walk around isn't really important, the only thing that matters is which sides of the blocks you can reach and push. Therefore, some games have implemented interfaces where you just tap where you want to go and the character moves automatically.
However, I must say that the controls grew on me after a while. Swiping requires less precision, so it's easier to play one handed. Also, the game intelligently queues every swipe you make, so you can issue multiple commands quickly and then wait for the character to complete them. I just wish that he moved a bit faster.

I consider this one of the best puzzles games of the year and I strongly recommend it for the quality of its levels.

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: Watercolors for iPhone and iPad

I'm glad to host another review by Roberto Canogar. Hopefully more will follow!

Watercolors, developed by ADONIS SOFTWARE from Romania, is a Free game that was released a couple of months ago. It reached the #1 position in the Education category in 77 countries, and in the Puzzle category in 13 countries (including big countries like USA, UK and Canada to name a few).

At the moment the number of players in Game Center is close to one million. So, we can say it has been a successful game. But, is it a good puzzle game? What are the reasons behind its success? Lets try to answer these questions.

Watercolors is a game about mixing colors and also about drawing. I think that games that let you draw with colors have an immediate gratification. All of us secretly would love to know how to paint.

This game lets you mix colors effortlessly and with a clear objective, something that in real life is much more smudgy. Also, this theme seems to be a good match for the Education category as the numbers above suggest. Other puzzles inspired by these ideas come to mind: Flow Free and especially Puzzle Restorer.

Well, now let's talk about the game mechanics of Watercolors. This game is about mixing three elementary colors: blue, red and yellow. So first we have to get very familiar on how they mix.

Bellow we see a detail of Level 1 and Level 2. The first one (on the left) shows us that we have to drag colors from filled circles to glowing and hollow circles of the same color by following a path of connected white circles.

The second level (on the right) tells us that we can combine colors by dragging a color on top of another one. So we can make a first stroke from the yellow filled circle to the empty spot indicated by the arrow, and then we can make a second stroke from the blue filled circle all the way to the bottom because as we pass the yellow circle the stroke changes to green (Blue+Yellow=Green).

But level 2 can be drawn with one stroke! We start it from the yellow filled circle and we go to the blue filled circle which will change color to green (see left). Then without lifting the finger we go all the way to the hollow green circle (see right).

By solving levels with the minimum number of strokes we gain 3 stars, and for suboptimal solutions we receive 2, 1 or even 0 stars. I enjoy finding the minimum number of moves.

It is quite rewarding to do all the steps that are involved in the resolution of a puzzle. First we have to look at the picture, recognizing the elementary colors and the compound colors and their relative positions. Second we plan our strokes, and third we execute them. Many times the strokes are long and go back and forth the screen, and change several times of color as they pass through different solid circles. Like the next one, that can be solved with one long stroke.

But then, the next level is essentially the same, even the same colors. OK, instead of Snakes (look at the title of the levels) we have to draw a Fancy Glass, but that's it.

The next one, level 10, is almost the same again. This happens often. Level 5 and 6 are equally similar. Then level 11 and 12 are also the same. I often think "OK, I've got it... don't bore me, please!". But this repetition is done purposely, and it probably makes more good than harm. I don't like repeating puzzles, but there must be a lot of people who prefer it this way.

Apart from the tiresome learning curve I would say that the level design is dull. One is rarely surprised by a cleverly designed level. Sporadically, one gets a very tough one (e.g. level 17 of the Three-Colors pack). There is a Pro-Pack which is challenging, but the levels look messy and chaotic. The result is that the levels are not enticing at all.

To add more variety there is a time mode, where we have to solve as many levels as possible in a specific amount of time. But the selection of levels presented in the time mode seems like a random selection of levels from the standard mode. So we may start with a trivial level, followed by a very complex one. There is so much luck involved in the random selection that I don't enjoy it, frankly.

Anyway, I have to give a thumbs up for the presentation of the game. It is mostly white, very clean, nothing groundbreaking but simple and effective. The omnipresent white is a perfect backdrop for all the colorful strokes that you do. Then the user interface is quite good in general, but there are two things I dislike. First, the undo button doesn't discount the number of strokes, so if one wants to get three stars it is useless.

The second problem is that the figures that you paint resemble objects (Snakes, Fancy Glass), so they tend to have many connected circles very close together, much more than otherwise required. So it is very easy to paint a wrong circle, which often implies starting over. This is more of a problem on the iPhone, and it is a big problem when you are under time pressure. In this sense the Grid-Pack worked better for me, because in this pack the connections are made through a grid so it very easy to follow a path.

So, in summary, this is mostly an easy game, and thus very approachable. And even after all my criticism, playing it is an enjoyable experience. Probably these are two of the reasons of its success. But as a puzzle game it could have been better.

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: Game About Squares for iPhone and iPad

Game About Squares by Andrey Shevchuk is, sadly, both an exceptionally good puzzle game, and another story of shameless cloning on the App Store. There are actually so many clones that it's almost impossible to find the official version using iTunes, so make sure to use the link above.

Born as a HTML5 app, it was online for some time without gaining much visibility. Interestingly, like 2048 before it, it seems to have become viral after it appeared on Hacker News. Immediately after that, after the week or so needed to pass Apple's review, the App Store was flooded with clones.

And for good reason! This is one of those rare cases of an idea brilliant in its simplicity, but at the same time capable of deep complexity.
Your goal is to bring each square over the dot of the same color. To move the squares, you just tap them, and they move by one step in the direction of the arrow.

Of course the squares aren't always finely aligned like in the above case, so you'll have to nudge them in the right position, by pushing them with other squares.

To add more dynamicity to the movement of the squares, the board can also contain some dark arrows. When a square goes over one of those arrows, its movement direction changes. This is somewhat reminiscent of another great game released this year, Perfect Paths.

And that's all! There are no other mechanics added to the mix.

The game contains 36 puzzles, and be assured that it will keep your interest high until the end. The first few puzzles wonderfully teach the mechanics without need for any tutorial, then the puzzles start to get intriguingly simple and complex at the same time.
This is some of the best level design I've ever seen, and I think it is the final proof that to make a puzzle game varied you don't need to add a lot of different mechanics, but you just need good mechanics that can be pushed to their limits in different ways.

For example I got stuck for a while on this puzzle. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be impossible, until it eventually clicked. Think outside the box.

Inbetween the levels the author has added some jokes which made me smile a few times. Other people hated them.YMMV. Puzzled by the flowery dots in the above screenshot? You'll have to play the game to understand what's going on.

The user interface is minimalist and works perfectly. The only minor issue I had was that the app is simply a wrapper of the HTML5 game done using PhoneGap, so the frame rate is poor on older devices. But this isn't certainly the kind of game that requires 60fps to be enjoyed.

This is without a doubt one of the best puzzle games of 2014, and its author is smart and witty. I hope to see more from him in the near future.

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: iON Bond for iPhone and iPad

Apologies for the infrequent updates. I've been tied up by family matters and by contract work on Puzzlium. So many great puzzle games have been released in the past few months! Even if I don't have time to write full reviews, I always talk about the best games on Twitter, so make sure to follow me.
 
It's rare for me to like puzzle games that have a real time element, but iON Bond by Stewart Hogarth caught my interest, probably because the timing is very relaxed and doesn't require deadly accuracy nor lightning fast reflexes.

Those ?????? you can see above intrigued me enough that I made it a point of honor to see what was hiding there before writing this review. I succeeded, which should be good proof that the game is interesting enough, and the difficulty properly balanced.

The premises of the game are pretty simple. There are some particles on the screen, which you can't control directly, but only through bonds that you can form with other particles.

You use your finger to draw bonds. When you connect two particles, they start to interact depending on their sign. Opposite signs attract, equal signs repel. The particles have lots of intertia and they move rather slowly, so you have time to form complex interactions between multiple particles. You can also break the bonds you formed by swiping through them; this is something that you'll need to do often as the game progresses.

When two particles collide, they leave traces reminiscent of the ones we are used to see when reading about particle accelerators. Your primary goal is to make all particles collide. The secondary goal is to collect all the small grey dots (which represent neutrinos).

The particles can have different colors; only particles of the same color will react during a collision, particles of different colors will just stop.

Charged particles are the most common, but there are also neutral particles like the red ones below. They don't interact with other particles, so you need to find other ways to move them.

Normally the walls are friendly: they just stop the particles, but you can draw bonds over them without limitations. Dark walls, however, will destroy particles that hit them, which isn't a good thing, because to complete a level you must destroy the particles only through collisions. Additionally, bonds cannot pass through dark matter, so e.g. in the level below you can't bond the two red particles.

There are many other elements introduced later, like "uncertain" particles, energy fields, unstable particles. This helps keep the game varied through its 60 levels.

The game plays in real time, however it doesn't feel like an action game, because the speed is quite slow. The levels feel more like proper puzzles, because figuring out what to do is harder than timing your actions correctly. Many of the levels have an easy, obvious solution which unfortunately isn't enough to collect the neutrinos. To get those, you often have to go significantly out of your way.

The user interface is improvable. I found it annoying that there isn't a button to immediately restart a level: you need to go through an intermediate menu. I was also put off by the very long fades and unskippable splash screen that happen when you launch the game. It all gives a feeling of a "console" game, instead of a mobile game that one wants to load as quickly as possible.

The game doesn't work well on phones, because everything is very small and difficult to interact with. Additionally, on my 4th gen iPod Touch it ran at a rather low frame rate, making it sluggish and difficult to control. On iPad Mini it works fine.

Curious about what the ?????? button I mentioned at the beginning does? I'm not going to spoil the surprise: you'll need to collect three neutrinos in all levels to see for yourself. However, I think that to make the effort really worthwhile there should be Game Center integration, which sadly is missing.

All in all, this is a nice relaxing game which is worth a try.

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: 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.

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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.

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