toblix

Hexcells Hexcells Hexcells Squarecells

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Hey, it's me toblix! I never post here, so you must think this is probably important! You're right: I want to tell you all about these four amazing puzzle games: Hexcells, Hexcells Plus, Hexcells Infinite and, as of just the other day, Squarecells!

 

If you haven't already bought these, you should just go ahead and get the Hexcells Complete Pack on Steam right now, because these are the best logic puzzle games you are ever going to play. If you think it's a bit much, at least get just Hexcells.

 

Okay, so all these games are very similar, the difference being the actual puzzles you have to solve. In each of them you're presented with a board of cells, and you have to use clues such as how many cells in this row are marked, or how many neihgboring cells are marked, and so on, to mark/clear the right ones. No guessing, just pure deduction and logic. It's like Picross or Sudoku, only even better, and there's ambient music while you play! If you pay close attention, you can hear your skull literally creaking to accommodate your growing brain. And so cheap, I cannot believe it!!!

 

Do like me, and get these games and play them. I had never been addicted to anything before I played Hexcells, and now I am frustrated that I'll have to wait months for the next Squarecells game. Speaking of which, does anyone know of any other great logic puzzlers I can play while I wait for Squarecells Plus?

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Is your name John Walker? :P

Joke aside, I don't know if you'll agree, but to me this game feels like playing Sudoku (which I don't enjoy). I only played the first one even though I own all three. While the levels get slightly harder as you go I didn't feel like I was learning anything from the puzzles, they just require you do longer strings of logic. Solving them didn't feel rewarding to me, it was kind of rote.

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It's like Minesweeper, but good!

 

I really liked the Hexcells games, but wasn't so keen on Squarecells. I still think it's good, but it seemed to require a lot more in-head testing of solutions than Hexcells did. I think it's also worth pointing out that Hexcells Infinite lives up to the promise and includes a random puzzle generator for continuous Hexcelling.

 

If you like Picross and have a 3DS, there are 6 Picross e games available for $6 apiece. And don't bother with Pokemon Picross. That game's a heap of F2P garbage.

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I agree it's wery much in the wein of Sudoku, in that you combine a number of simple rules and data in order to eliminate possible solutions, and that it's always solvable without guesswork (at least I assume that's a requirement for a proper sudoku puzzle!)

 

When playing the first game I also expected it to require increasingly greater leaps of logic, and reach a point where I would be unable to keep all the information in my head, requiring me to start taking notes or sketch out different «moves ahead» to eliminate possible solution paths or whatever. What I found (which is also the reason I consider these games particularly great,) is that it doesn't really do that. It definitely gets harder and more demanding, but not really in that way. It really just keeps forcing you to reason and think in new and unexpected ways. My brain's not that great, and I've been able to solve all the puzzles in each game without ever guessing or taking a note or keeping track of a bunch of stuff at a time.. The challenge is always identifying the one data point you're missing that resolves or unravels a bunch of stuff on the board in a very satisfying way. You can stare at a board for hours (I literally have) without seeing a way forward, and then come back the next day with a fresh mind, glance at it and go «well obviously that cell has to go» and it's more satisfying than most AAA video game endings.

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Korax, that's a great tip. Also a good reminder I need to finish that Layton Phoenix Wright game so I can play picross!

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Thank you, Toblix! I love Hexcells, didn't know about Squarecells, now I bought it.

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I love Hexcells and really need to boot up Squarecells. Too many games to play.

 

Korax, that's a great tip. Also a good reminder I need to finish that Layton Phoenix Wright game so I can play picross!

 

Skip the 2D ones for now and pick up a copy of Picross 3D for the original DS. So good.

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I'm going to be a voice of dissent and say that Pokemon Picross is good. It maxes out the microtransactions at 30 bucks, which is similar to a normal 3DS game. I also enjoy the different modes and variety of abilities the different 'mons provide.

Hexcells is good. I need to get back into it, especially since I've installed a steam utility that lets me easily use my 360 controller for games that don't support it natively. It would be a great one for that.

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The challenge is always identifying the one data point you're missing that resolves or unravels a bunch of stuff on the board in a very satisfying way. You can stare at a board for hours (I literally have) without seeing a way forward, and then come back the next day with a fresh mind, glance at it and go «well obviously that cell has to go» and it's more satisfying than most AAA video game endings.

 

Hexcells is great! What Toblix didn't say is that all of the main puzzles are hand-designed, generally with a design ethos which emphasizes this linchpin structure. The random levels in Hexcells Infinite's endgame feel so sloppy and inelegant in comparison, large swathes of redundant clues, so many possible ways forward at any one time that it feels less like a guided tour of the board and more like an uncontrolled fungal growth.

 

Pokemon Picross is a weird beast. Capping the amount you can spend on a kid-marketed F2P game is an important step towards shaking common exploitative practices, and the puzzles are still fun, but everything surrounding it still leaves me sour. The game follows the now-standard design of constant timers and energy and grind and upsell. One Gamefaqs poster calculated that to unlock all the puzzles and upgrades without buying soft currency would require over a year of playing the daily training levels.

 

Early on I fell into what appears to be an intentionally designed trap of wasting soft currency on an upgrade during a time when it had no value to me. Finishing a puzzle gives you a Pokemon. Equipping a Pokemon while entering a puzzle lets you use that Pokemon's ability, generally a hint (which columns or rows can you make progress on) or a cheat (reveal random tiles, slow down the timer). One of the few ways to earn soft currency is by completing missions on puzzles, which involve solving that puzzle under a time limit, bringing in specific numbers or types of Pokemon, and using specific cheats, with a small bonus if you complete every mission in one go. One of the first 15x15 puzzles includes a mission asking you to equip 3 Pokemon. The maximum party size at the end of the tutorial is two, upgrading the party size costs soft currency, and until that point all of the missions were possible to complete. So I upgraded the party size. And only then did I learn that Pokemon can only be brought into puzzles when the width of the puzzle you used to catch it is at least as wide as the current puzzle. Convoluted garbage.

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All the F2P stuff in Pokemon Picross is aggravating, but my problems with it boil down to 2 main things:

 

When you pay the $32 dollars to "fully unlock" the game (a transaction that must be done in at least 2 steps, because the unlock is 5000 moneys and the highest amount you can buy is 4000), it doesn't actually unlock anything. You get a button that you click to get 1000 more moneys. You still have to go through the rigamarole of topping up money and then spending it to do anything. I won't claim that it would be a trivial thing to do, but a clean unlock of everything would at least show that it had been designed as a piece of software first, rather than a vehicle for microtransactions.

 

It's just terrible value. Looking at the product info, there are around 300 puzzles of various types in Pokemon Picross. There are also 6 Picross e games available, each for $6, each with at least 150 puzzles. For $4 more, you can get 3 times the number of puzzles. It's a $20-dollar premium for a largely-unnecessary hint system and the ability to draw a pixel-art charmander instead of a pixel-art sailboat. I like Pokemon, but not that fucking much.

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In the second one the puzzles are getting kind of longish. A few times I really did stare at the screen for half an hour and one time it came to me that there's this thing I had never looked at before and Bam! That was the solution.

I kind of dislike that you can make as many mistakes as you want and continue onwards.

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If you finish a level making at most one mistake, then the level icon will turn shiny! Positive reinforcement!

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In the second one the puzzles are getting kind of longish. A few times I really did stare at the screen for half an hour and one time it came to me that there's this thing I had never looked at before and Bam! That was the solution.

In the third one, saving exists.

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the third one has some really long puzzles with a lot of hexes. Too easy to make more than ne mistake.

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If you finish a level making at most one mistake, then the level icon will turn shiny! Positive reinforcement!

Wow, so far I though it was only without mistakes. So you can get the perfection achievement when you make one mistake in each level? Kind of feels like cheating, sometimes you can gain a lot of information with a mistake.

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Wow, so far I though it was only without mistakes. So you can get the perfection achievement when you make one mistake in each level? Kind of feels like cheating, sometimes you can gain a lot of information with a mistake.

There might be people who restart levels after even a single mistake. Strange people.

 

Squarecells was fun too. Now I want more Squarecells.

 

Hexcells I liked a bit more - though Square's design is clean and simple and compact as well, Matthew Brown did a better job with the Hexes, I'd say.

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There might be people who restart levels after even a single mistake. Strange people.

Yes, me! Except now at one of the last levels of Hexcells Plus I was actually grateful for the one-mistake allowance. I had spent two hours staring at the puzzle, then took a break, came back and solved it but made a wrong click almost at the end by accident. Glad I didn't have to redo it.

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Yes, me! Except now at one of the last levels of Hexcells Plus I was actually grateful for the one-mistake allowance. I had spent two hours staring at the puzzle, then took a break, came back and solved it but made a wrong click almost at the end by accident. Glad I didn't have to redo it.

The fun I had restarting a level after 45 minutes of careful thinking and staring and solving because my fingers forgot for a second which button does what or just because they got lazy for a bit and 'fell' on a button. I even restarted when this didn't result in a mistake but solved something by accident for which I didn't have the solution yet.

On the upside this sometimes led to finding other, nicer solutions or at least a great feeling of flow in cleaning out the early sections I still knew the solutions for.

Fantastic games!

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I finished all of the hexcells with perfection, except the infinite ones obviously. Great little games, I got addicted, which hasn't happened to me in a while with games.

 

Now to squarecells!

 

[Edit] When searching for hexcells on steam, for some reason also Cross Set came up, although HexCells, SquareCells and Cross Set seem to be made by different people...

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I'm not sure I like SquareCells. Even if I arrive at the solution perfectly, it feels like I did it by chance. And there's probably usually one moment in the very beginning of the puzzle that takes a long time to solve, and then it all flows naturally. Hexcells made these moments more numerous and spread out in different sections of the board.

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