Crime Reaper

My partner loves Sudoku and Picross so this is going to be the perfect gift for her! There's also a lot of polish with the vfx and sounds which is awesome!

chill Sudoku like puzzler

I really like this game. A bit more room on the side to organize unplaced tiles might be nice though.

It's a fun game! I made the mistake of assuming that the gameplay would get progressively harder as I played through the main missions, so played the whole thing on easy, and finished the main story in half an hour feeling underwhelmed. It turns out you're actually supposed to choose to level up the difficulty yourself when you feel ready, which is an unusual mechanic, but actually pretty cool because it gives you a high degree of control. As soon as I figured out my mistake and started playing on normal difficulty in free play, I started having a lot of fun! You can make the timer invisible so it isn't stressing you out, but you'll still be shown your time when you finish the puzzle regardless. You get up to three mistakes per puzzle, and the game keeps track of your 'streak', which is how many puzzles in a row you completed without any mistakes. This incentives you to not just make guesses, because it'll reset your streak - but if you're really stuck, the option to guess and be corrected is there, as a sort of hint system. This is yet another way that the game allows you to customise your experience to choose how much pressure you want - the option to be competitive and try to improve your streak and best time is there, but you can also completely ignore that if you want a more cosy and stress-free experience. I love the endless replayability, and the deduction element. It's much more fun than Sudoku! It's more of a deduction/logic game really, with some sudoku elements.

For someone who doesn't enjoy sudoku, I'm surprised by how much I've enjoyed this game. (The reason I got it in the first place is I'm a fan of the creator's previous game, suteF.) The game is very pleasing aesthetically and the narrative, while rudimentary, helps frame the experience in a refreshing way. I do wish there was a bit more depth to the story, although that would probably interfere with the procedural generation (the levels are randomized). I also felt that the absurdist-humorous tone of the dialogue in-between the levels was a bit at odds with the vibe of the levels themselves, which felt rather darker (largely thanks to the brooding soundtrack). The adjustable difficulty and the hint system work very well for someone like myself whose sudoku skills are close to nonexistent. All in all, I've found the game to be a great way to pass time when you have a few minutes to kill.

I really enjoy sudoku but was burning out on doing the same old process for solving puzzles. Enter: Crime Reaper. It's scratching the same itch for sudoku but with some really fun writing and clever mechanics that put a super fun, logical puzzle twist on it. It even allows me to turn off complexities and rules so that I can just go at my own pace and not worry about making mistakes. Or, if you're into it, kick up the difficulty! Highly recommend!

I don't want to recommend for or against this game, so consider this an annoyed but hopeful review. This is an interesting take on the Sudoku principle, adding hints about object locations relative to other objects. It's a cool idea but for some odd reason the developers stopped there. Why? You can solve 5 or 10 or 15 of these and raise the difficulty but then you realise you've seen all it has to offer and you get bored. This is definitely not worth what is asked, I even think the 6$ I paid for it is too much, but I'm not going to refund this in hopes the developers try to make another innovative puzzle game in the future, this time with much more depth and replayability. If you are interested in Sudoku-like puzzles I highly recommend a website called logic-masters that has amazing free puzzles (despite having the worst UI in history of the internet).