![]() I'm picking, because this is magnificent. ![]() (For the puzzle nerds out there, it minds me of the Wario levels of Mario Picross, but without the twists.) It would smooth things out, and importantly, allow the levels to get harder. I would really love to see highlighting cells be ignored by the game, such that a level is complete once all the correct cells are eliminated. Having that taken away from you - and with there being almost no consequences to making mistakes (you need to collect enough not-making-mistake points to open later levels) - ends up unnecessarily simplifying the experience. And computer-based versions of such puzzles suit this even better, letting you 'undo' your way back to the point of error. Pretty much every great puzzle allows you to make those mistakes, whether it's putting the wrong number in a lowly sudoku cell, or greying the wrong square in a picross, you can realise you went wrong a while back when you find a dead end. ![]() If you can't incorrectly highlight a hexagon, then you can't make a mistake that won't be discovered until later. This has a rather counter-intuitive side effect: it ends up making the puzzles easier, rather than tougher. Quite unusually for puzzle games of this ilk (although to be fair, this is a pretty original and smart new style), you're penalised both for trying to destroy an incorrect cell and for incorrectly highlighting one. Where the game makes a slight misstep is with how it recognises mistakes. ![]() Oh, and then -3- means they're not connected. That there, it may be adjacent to a "1" cell, so you can then eliminate any others that number cell is touching. So if you've a column of seven hexagons, and you've got a, you know that the middle cell needs to be highlighted. At this point the tactics really start to flow in. Further, should that external number be in curly brackets, that means the hexagons are consecutive (to a degree - gaps don't count, interrupting numbered cells do). The two rules need to be applied at the same time. Numbers start appearing on the outside of the grids too, determining how many hexagons must be highlighted in that column. Get a couple of puzzle groups in, and the game then evolves, introducing a much more distinctly Picross element. Here your moves are deduced through reason and logic, and however tricky it might get, if you can't figure out what to do next, the fault is with you. Hexcells, thank goodness, takes the gem of an idea that exists within that rotten core, and realises it brilliantly. It should be struck from the records of human history, locked in a lead cage, and buried a hundred miles beneath a desert. Unlike all the great puzzles I mentioned above, Microsoft's freebie is a blight, with its enforced guessing and lack of a fair, logical solution. There's no doubt that this is most similar to Minesweeper, except crucially, it's not terribly executed. Adjacent hexagon cells, that need to be shaded or destroyed according to the numbered cells that are dotted throughout. Hexcells falls somewhere between Picross and Minesweeper, but is far more than a grab bag of ideas from elsewhere. So thank goodness for Matthew Brown Games' Hexcells. But goodness me, the PC is starved of quality offerings in this field. I've spent literally hundreds and hundreds of hours playing Slitherlinks and Picrosses on my various Nintendo handhelds, and can't walk past a Nurikabe without shading. A day doesn't go by without at least a couple of Killer Sudoku completed, and currently Kakuros help me slide off to sleep each night. I adore gentle puzzle games, and they gobble up vast amounts of my time. ![]()
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