I guess they’re not firing a “level completed” event until the transition animation is finished, resulting in the challenge level receiving the “level completed” event rather than the tutorial level.

I guess it’s only game-breaking if you can’t stop yourself from using it though

About the Error reporting - I didn’t like it. In my last challenge puzzle I missed a hint (or you get to a point where the correctness of one of two positions is only revealed by solving the puzzle to its end, like in the famous Einstein puzzle http://tinyurl.com/4lko4). After going through 90% of the following solution mentally and deciding for a number, i was pretty stumped that it told me I’m wrong after the first click. This made an possibly intricate problem pretty easy, because after the error report i instantly new to pick the other number and could click the whole solution to its end.

1) If just as you finish a Puzzle you hit the “Take the Challenge!” button and quickly click-through the confirmation before the next puzzle loads, you will get credit for completing the challenge instead of credit for completing the puzzle you just finished. This results in getting the achievement for beating the location, unlocking all puzzles in the location and being allowed to advance to the next area.

2) Let’s say you have a cage which you are unsure of it’s bounds as it is not fully painted yet. Eliminate all the options in the cell you are unsure of by right-clicking and then hover over the cell with the operator in it. If the cell you were debating about was in fact contained in the cage, you will find that the list of available solutions has turned entirely red - since the game knows that cell is in the cage.

I very much enjoy how it pushed the mechanic in non-linear directions, as opposed to the standard increase-the-challenge-by-increasing-the-size method. I enjoyed the comparison, painting and even / odd mechanics a lot.

I also really like how the game is presented in a very intuitive fashion. I played with the error-reporting off, which makes it so that you can screw up and not know it until much later. However there’s a very convenient feature - if you reach that point and click for a Hint, it will give you the option to revert to the last state in which you had no errors in the puzzle. This proved to be very useful on a couple of occasions where I would have otherwise just given up in frustration.

I had mixed reactions to the Par system. On the one hand it seemed a bit much to be penalized for taking notes. However on the other hand, it helped encourage users to improve their memory and reasoning, and added an element of challenge without a need for a ticking clock or massive penalties if you screw up.

Thanks for pointing this game out Jon!

- Andy

P.S. This is the composer who you met while we were both waiting in line to trade-in our Droids for Nexus Ones. You told me to get a hold of you via your blog to discuss Raspberry - so here I am!

I’d have missed this if you hadn’t recommended it here, thanks!

There’s an hour spent gaming when I should have been animating.

Nice selection Jon! Lot’s of fun and completely addictive.

Cheers
–Phil

What I loved most about the game was the way it condensed down the meat of the game to be the actual unlocking of the logic needed to solve each puzzle and removed most of the extraneous thinking and work by removing the numbers that aren’t possible automatically etc. It made for quite a different game than Kenken once you got the mechanics like painting the cages which are initially of an unknown size and there were a few interesting mechanics that emerged from using the ‘greater/less than’ symbols which were new to me. Towards the end of the forest levels I noticed some fatigue for me in playing the game for the first time since no new mechanics had been introduced for a while and it was just about making the puzzles bigger. I started to lose track of whichnumbers were unique in a row/column once up to the 6 columns which felt against the rest of the design decisions which took out the unnecessary thinking - but maybe that would have been a step too far.

All in all it was great and very polished. I’m thinking about explaining to my mum how to install Steam and then gift her a copy. I think she might enjoy it - and its good value with so many puzzles included.