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Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Snavi by Billy Clack FREE


Snavi comes from Billy and Mary Clack. The object is to get Your Man, the snail, to pick up the stars and keys and get to the exit.
After playing the first 5 or 6 levels, I thought: yawn, another maze game where everything slides until they hit a wall.  But no!  Snavi has many interesting elements that make for some fun and very challenging puzzle levels.
Interesting Features;
1. The board can rotate 90 degrees.  See the first image.
2. The green rectangles can fall as the board gets rotated. Your Man can get crushed/killed. Be careful. See the second image.
3. Wormholes & electric fences. See the third image.
4. Magnets lock the green blocks in place. See the sixth image.
5. The purple squares with white trim: Your Man & Green rectangles cannot cross the white line, but can traverse those squares in the 3 other directions. See the fifth image.
6. The red & blue rectangles: they toggle on/off. When the blue rectangles are active, the red ones become invisible. 
7. Lasers need to be blocked in order to get by. See the fourth image.
There are over 100 levels. I've done most of them. Many have taken repeated attempts.  Look at the first image. That's level 2-14. I've tried about 25 times and still have not solved it.

Billy & Mary: great job!  

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1540408584#?platform=iphone

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Unit 404 by Maxim Urusov $2.99

Unit 404 comes from Maxim Urusov. Whenever Maxim publishes a game - you know it's going to be hard. Scroll to the bottom to see his other games.  
The object is to get Your Man, the robot, to the destination.  The basic function is for the robot to walk onto a square. That square will be zoomed along a horizontal or vertical axis if there's another square on that axis.  Very similar to Luma Link from 2012, which is also fantastic.
Unit 404 adds a slew of elements to make things even harder. There's the purple arrow square which always advances one unit after it has been zoomed.
Not shown in these 5 images: one type of square grabs all the surrounding squares in a 3x3 grid and rotates them.
I've solved about 60% of the levels. That's about 4 hours of entertainment for just $3. A bargain. On many levels, I probably had 20 attempts.

One very interesting feature: the robot will want to travel either right to left or left to right. Sometimes, changing his direction is part of the puzzle.

Unit 404 is a gem. There should be a Leader Board feature in order to see if/who has solved them all.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onemanband.unit404&hl=en_US&gl=US

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unit-404/id1518191729

Max's other games:

the Sequence [2]

Hard Logic

Friday, December 4, 2020

Straight Lines 3D by Omer Faruk Hilal FREE

Straight Lines 3D is a 'minimalist' puzzle from Omer Faruk Hilal. The object is to  swap the lines to make connections.

I'm not sure how many levels there are. And I'm not sure if I completed them all. At the moment, the program is taking me back to the beginning.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/straight-lines-3d/id1539204591

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Ball Slider: Fill Box Puzzle by XINGMING HUANG FREE

Ball Slider: Fill Box Puzzle comes from Xingming Huang.  The object is to slide all the balls until they hit a wall or into an empty space.
I solved about 60 levels in roughly 30 minutes.  After doing 3 or 4 levels, there is an ad.  Usually the 5 second type.
This game is strictly for beginning puzzlers who need to build some confidence. 

Doing the last 25 levels I was curious: could I play it badly so that there would be a position that could not be solved? The answer is no!  Which means this game's main purpose is to generate ad revenue.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ball-slider-fill-box-puzzle/id1542183253