Alien Cartographer

Yes yes yes! My new favourite minesweeper-like. This is surely the cosiest of them all, too.

fun logic game, no guessing required

Solid recommendation if you enjoy pure logic puzzles. The rules are a lot to keep in your head (but are introduced gradually) and the UI is maybe a little clunky, but the puzzle design is very impressive, with new ideas introduced all the way through.

Alien Cartographer has some interesting ideas, but I think the execution is a bit more frustrating than it needs to be. When many symbols crowd the playing area, it becomes busywork trying to figure out the one symbol or color that you can 100 % place and the difficulty becomes more about remembering the rules and looking through the playing field over and over than actually thinking about what the solution might be. That is even more true as many levels don't do a good job of "railroading" themselves slowly into a clear solution, but remain very open until the level is almost over, which is a style of puzzling I personally don't enjoy very much, and it also makes it easy to make mistakes. One mistake means you have to restart (if you want to get the achievements, which require you to do every level perfectly). So if you almost solve a big level and then make a mistake, back to the starting line and then you need to set all the symbols again, which involves several clicks per symbol or a click-and-hold which sometimes chooses the wrong symbol. It feels a bit like a hard Sudoku game, where you spend more time looking for that one number than having a satisfying gameplay flow of cracking the puzzle step by step. The first 20 out of 100 levels I really enjoyed even as they got more complex, but then it felt harder and harder to find the next step in the ever bigger puzzles in a way I did not enjoy. I fully acknowledge that some of that is me not being smart enough and not meshing with the gameplay style, but even so it often felt like busywork more than me racking my brain for the solutions. Personally I can't recommend it, but I see the concept and I can see some people really enjoying getting lost in the weeds here, but the actual puzzling felt unsatisfying for me. Either way, it's cheap and you will know whether you like it before 2 hours are over, so give it a chance if the concept sounds interesting to you; it didn't vibe with me, sadly.

[url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43083373/]Clever games curator review: 7/10[/url]. This is a game that feels a bit like Minesweeper, in that you’re trying to deduce what’s hidden inside a grid of cells. However, its structure is much more constrained. For example, houses must be adjacent to other houses, gold mines need to have power cores next to them, and every village requires a power core—though not every power core must be next to a gold mine. The game does an excellent job of introducing these rules gradually, then increasing the challenge without piling on new concepts before you’ve had time to internalize the existing ones. That said, the progression can be a bit steep, and some levels may leave you feeling a little lost until you stop and carefully reconsider all of the rules. It’s not overly frustrating, but it does demand more deliberate thought than something like traditional *Minesweeper*, where the rules are simple enough that you only need to learn them once. It also features a strong in-game hypertext help system that explains each rule clearly and lets you move easily between earlier and later concepts. Importantly, the rules themselves never change. Early levels simply rely on a smaller subset of them, and the game only introduces new rules when they become relevant. It’s a very effective approach, and I appreciated how well it works. As for the presentation, it’s extremely minimalistic but clear and readable. The music is surprisingly good, though it does loop the same track repeatedly. The controls work equally well with a mouse or a touchscreen. Overall, this is a solid little game that I enjoyed playing. There are plenty of levels (I didn’t come close to finishing them all) but it’s easy to pick up and return to later, especially thanks to the excellent help system.

This is an excellent new take on minesweeper puzzles with interesting new deductions and puzzles that can be quite deep while taking up a very small area. The UI and QOL are a bit barebones but plenty good enough to solve the puzzles in game (helped by the fact that many puzzles are small). I'd love to see these expanded upon with more user made puzzles so it's cool that there's workshop support from day 1 :)

Solid little deduction game, difficulty has felt spot on.

Very nice puzzle game. A small number of simple rules, but the interactions between them leave you a lot of detail to work out. I'm halfway through the campaign and happy to keep going.

It may look like a spreadsheet but this is so elegantly made

This game gets me the closest to feel like I'm one of the Cracking the Cryptic Hosts. Putting on the overlay and using deductive reasoning to figure out which pieces have to sit where, slowly moving in from figuring out potential colors to the building types. The games difficulty curve is not unreasonable, and while there are small issues like the codex behaving strangely when the overlay is on, none of them detract from your ability to play and enjoy the game. I think this is really splendid.