Hexcells (Matthew Brown, 2013) is an interesting Picross/ Minesweeper hybird. In contrast, Picross tends to be more zen you just keep filling in the board until you’ve got it. Now, Minesweeper has a little rogue in its machinery, make one mistake and it’s game over. You spend your time wringing out deductions from a scarcity of information. Picross games often function like Minesweeper: only if you solve the whole picture will the game declare you a winner. From this, you have to figure out the shape contained in the grid.
Numbers down the edge of a grid indicate the number of “coloured” cells in each row and column. There are a lot of Picross games, none of which I have played. I thoroughly enjoyed Cosmic Express last year which focuses the player on sequence and efficient use of space. From these humble constraints, a dizzying variety of puzzles emerge. Perhaps most challenging are the little green aliens that “soil” a carriage – other races will refuse to board a soiled carriage which tends to soil your perfect solution. There are variations such as a crossroads piece and portals. This time, the player’s route must pick up all alien passengers, drop them at their destinations then leave the level. It has a single train with limited space for passengers. You know you’ve made it when someone writes up the latest “how to make a smash hit” on your game.Ĭosmic Express could not be more different. However, Trainyard enjoyed much success, being one of the early indie breakouts in the nascent years of the App Store. Trainyard was not for me because I did not enjoy predicting where multiple trains would be at particular times by counting squares or running experiments. There are twists, of course: if trains “collide” their colours will combine and they will change colour if they travel through “painting squares”. Once you’ve drawn the rail, you start the trains and watch what happens. Each train has a colour and must arrive at a correspondingly coloured station. In Trainyard, the player must draw a rail to connect train depots to a destination. Rail-based puzzles such as Trainyard (Matt Rix, 2010) and Cosmic Express (Hazelden & Davis, 2017) are also algorithm games. We need not play recent Opus Magnum (Zachtronics, 2017) to delve into the world of algorithm puzzles, although we might not get such delectable GIFs.
They are programming metaphors, asking the player to construct an algorithm that solves a given problem. I’ll admit I haven’t seriously played any Zachtronics titles but they all share a common trait. In this article, effectively the final part of a trilogy on puzzle innovation, I want to head away from well-worn genres and talk about designs which feel more fresh. In the last two Ouroboros essays, we’ve talked about how puzzle design iteration is innovative and examined a particular design lineage.
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They have also been doing hardware reviews for a couple of years that generally don't take any sort of systematic approach to reviewing performance and are something done much better on many hardware-specific sites.This is the tenth part of The Ouroboros Sequence, a series on puzzle games. There is also a hell of a lot of filler content that didn't used to be there, such as endless news stories about minor updates to games - stuff that used to be the domain of sites like Kotaku, while RPS wrote interesting long form stuff about the experience of gaming. Today the a decent chunk of the content is advertorials pushing hardware deals (with referral links), although these masquerade as hardware 'news'. Virtually all of the best writers have moved on and (perhaps not coincidentally) the content has gone off a cliff.
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In its heyday it had the best writing about PC games on the internet and took a genuinely independent approach to covering PC gaming, often focusing on the personal relationship between games and gamers or aspects of the gaming industry not being examined by mainstream gaming sites. Many people would be familiar with Rock Paper Shotgun.
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