I have a love/hate relationship with pure logic puzzle games. On the one hand I do enjoy the challenge they provide, especially when they encourage you to think in new ways in order to solve a problem. On the other hand however they tend to have strict solutions, something which irritates me when I find what I think is a viable solution. SquareCells is the latest game I decided to frustrate myself with and, whilst I’m sure it’s logically sound, I can’t help but feel that the puzzle design is sometimes lacking the required information in order to solve it correctly.
The rules of SquareCells are relatively simple, you have to remove a certain number of blocks based on a series of numbers provided. These numbers can indicate how many cells are in a particular row or column, how they’re grouped together or even the order in which they appear. The rules are introduced slowly so you have a chance to get a feel for them before another layer of complexity gets added in. The boards also get substantially larger over time making simply guessing the correct squares that much harder. You can, of course, click your way through everything to find the solution and then go back and redo the puzzle but that feels like cheating yourself more than anything else.
For the first two “worlds” I felt like there was a pretty logical way to approach most of the puzzles. You had to find the single row which was immutable, I.E. one that was fully described by it’s row numbers. Then from there you could continue to extrapolate the composition of the other rows. However past row 3 I couldn’t seem to locate the first row which often meant I had to take a few wild guesses in order to get started. Whilst I’m sure I was missing something it certainly seemed like some puzzles didn’t have enough information to get you past that initial hump. This, of course, only really matters if you’re wanting to do the puzzle right on the first go but going back and redoing puzzles feels counter to the SquareCell’s purpose.
There were a couple of the smaller puzzles which I felt like I found a perfectly valid solution to which, sadly, weren’t correct. I get that this isn’t a game that allows for emergent behaviour but it did annoy me that a solution I thought should work didn’t. Upon closer inspection I did see that there was some information I wasn’t incorporating (number of blocks left to remove) but that didn’t make me feel any better.
Overall I felt SquareCells was a very well designed logic puzzle game even if I felt that I was operating on less information than what was required to complete it. Indeed given enough time I’m sure I could’ve figured out the requisite tricks to pass every level perfectly however the reward just wasn’t there to keep me coming back. Still I’m also the kind of person who gets inappropriately mad when trying to complete a sudoku puzzle so maybe I’m not the best judge for a game like SquareCells.
Rating: 7/10
SquareCells is available on PC right now for $2.99. Total play time was 2 hours with 43% of the achievements unlocked.
