![]() Also the game looks nice and has an ambient background "music" that can only be described as "soothing". It took me less than two hours to perfect the original Hexcells and I figured I could've played some more, so I bought Hexcells Plus and Hexcells Infinite too. All of the games have initial tutorial levels to teach the mechanics, but the difficulty level in Hexcells Plus goes up way quicker than in Hexcells - there are few really easy levels. The more difficult levels can even take up to 30 minutes or so, which started to feel like too much, especially given that you cannot save the game in the middle of a level! Also, it does feel irritating if you make a mistake towards the end of a level after having spent 20 minutes on it, especially if you're after the Perfectionist achievement without cheating.īoth Hexcells and Hexcells Plus have 36 levels, but it took me between 5 and 10 times longer to complete Hexcells Plus than Hexcells. All the levels in both games are hand-crafted and sometimes almost made me laugh at the beauty of the puzzle, which is a good sign of a good puzzle game. This is not a game for people who want more Hexcells, this is a game for people who want a greater challenge, and for them it’s sure to please.I'm still in the middle of Hexcells Infinite, which also has 36 hand-crafted levels, but in addition to that, millions of randomly generated levels and a possibility to load in community-made levels. Everything else about the game is essentially the same, so you just need to be on your toes if you want to dig into this one. The challenge is greater here, which pulled the puzzling back from absolutely compelling to somewhat exhausting. Hexcells Plus is another fine puzzle game in the vein of the first, just not one with quite as wide appeal. It might seem like I’m beating this one up, but I assure you I am not. Even with a helpful guide overlay and similar quality-of-life controls as the column numbers, this one proved difficult to keep up with in light of everything else on the board. There are also blue hexes with numbers that tell you how many hexes in a 2-hex radius need to be marked. ![]() Some hexes now clear with just a question mark instead of a number, refusing to give you any aid on what might be around. You’ll also have a few new gimmicks to manage, specifically designed to make it that much harder to see key layouts to proceed. If your favorite puzzles from the first game were ones near the end, this one picks up right from there and runs with it. I can’t stress enough how much harder Hexcells Plus is over Hexcells, though it’s not necessarily a bad thing. ![]() Here though, you’ll find yourself staring at seemingly impossible arrangements for five or ten minutes before spying the one clue that’s your ticket to progress. The puzzles of the previous product had a flow to them that wasn’t too hard to keep up with. There’s a palpable difference in the puzzle design here, still intensely clever but perhaps too clever now by a hair in how it expects you to string together connections. In rather striking contrast, this one gives you two or three easy puzzles up front as a refresher and then kicks your feet out from under you. In the original, each world of puzzles opened with a simple tutorial challenge to acclimate you to mechanics as they came up. The most noticeable element of Hexcells Plus for veterans is the speed with which it ramps up. You’ve got thirty puzzles to contend with, as well as some new mechanics we’ll talk about in a moment. Using this data, you must work out the locations of all the marked hexes and clear all the unmarked ones, preferably without fouling up too many times. Those numbers can also appear at the tops of columns, telling how many marked hexes lie below. Some numbers have special symbols like brackets or dashes to represent specific hex patterns. Right-click clears a hex, revealing a count of how many bordering hexes must be marked with left click. Just as with the first game, you’re playing hexagonal minesweeper. The result is a game only for masters of the first, the Lost Levels to Hexcells’ Super Mario Bros. Not only does it add complicated new mechanics to contend with, the core puzzle design is far more insidious about obfuscating the logic links to progress. ![]() It’s more of the same great logic puzzles, but significantly harder. ![]() Hexcells Plus takes a different tack, one not often seen in the modern era. Sometimes it takes the concept in new directions, sometimes it provides more of the same, and sometimes it shores up the weak points in the original. I always like to see how a sequel tries to build on its predecessor. ![]()
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