Recent reviews by Ari

High replay ability. Works very well on the Steam Deck. High value to this game if the basic gameplay appeals to you. It's a great game for picking up if you only have 30min to play at a time.

Many puzzles, varied difficulty which progresses gradually. Decent length for the style of game.

This puzzle game comes with a good number of levels as well as utilizing many different gameplay elements to keep the designs varied. They come with a nice range of difficulty - some of the starting puzzles taking mere moments to solve where the harder ones can take much longer.

The ability to have a hint system is great for giving some assistance to keep the game moving without getting frustrated/looking up the answer.

Only downsides I've found is that the game doesn't remember some of the display settings (I had to switch it to windowed mode every time I launched the game). Other then that, it lived up to what was advertised.

Note: I received the game as a gift from a friend.

Considering this is a fairly inexpensive game I don't hold it to high standards - however, despite being the sequel it manages to be worse then "GooCubelets".

A few things I had issue with:
- less controller support; for some reason the start button isn't mapped to reset the puzzle like in GooCublets
- had to troubleshoot the graphic for the position marks to show on the puzzles
- most of the puzzles use edge movements which frequently put your block off grid by fragments of a square

The last point is the biggest concern as most of the puzzles have mechanics based on more edge-focused movements which sometimes cause your block to be off grid and it can throw off the whole puzzle. This was also present in GooCublets but was only an issue in a handful of the later puzzles.

Another mechanic they added was black blocks which cause a fail of you touch them but their area of effect is only indicated by small splash marks which makes navigating around them more challenging for no reason as their "hit box" is invisible in places.

Most of the challenge with this game is just dealing with some of the quirky movement physics rather than the actual block placement puzzles.

This game is like a hybrid of Minesweeper and Picross - which is good. However, "Hexcells" on its own is not very challenging and acts more of an introduction to the style of puzzles. If you feel you're good at the core concept of Minesweeper-type playstyle (or only want to get one) check out Hexcells Plus or Hexcells Infinite instead.

Basically spent ~3 hours getting 100% achievements. It was fun and worth the price I paid for it. I recommend getting it bundled with the others since, as I wrote previously, pretty much an introduction to the puzzle style and Plus and Infinite add more challenging mechanics.

This game is your usual match 3+ and clear the board type game. It doesn't have a timer so for the first 40 levels you can pretty much zen out and match at your own pace.

However, the difficulty level shoots through the roof 45+ so the zen level decreases ten-fold. Play-time wise, I spent more time on the last 3 levels then the 52 levels prior.

Due to the out of whack difficulty I can't really recommend it overall. If you're content playing 40 levels for $5 that's fine. If you're looking for a more gradual difficulty experience I'd check out 4 Elements instead.

ReignMaker is a game which takes the match-3 gameplay and rolls with it. With the game's design, different boards can result in completely different strategies. For example, certain situations may result in the player making matches on certain areas of the board in contrast to keeping just a high frequency of matches.

The game offers "power-ups" through magic spells (charged by matches), NPCs and disposable items (bombs, blockades). Both elements are useful but for a generic playthrough I found that most boards could be completed using only magic spells or just straight matches.

The difficulty balancing is not perfect - one of the levels I had the most difficulty on was only halfway through. Yet I managed to perfect levels much later on without issue.

It'd definitely recommended for someone who enjoys the Tower Defense and Match-3 genres.