Liquidum

Difficulty : 3/5 (Rather Hard) Global : 3/5 (Very Good) Curator page : [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44695991-Anokturnus/]Anokturnus[/url] Liquidum is sort of like a picross or hex puzzle game, but much more complex. The numbers on the rows represent the total number of water units they contain, and you have to fill them using logic. Thus far, nothing changes from a classic picross game. However, the puzzles of Liquidum are not just about using those numbers. The grid is divided into several aquariums and to fill the upper level of an aquarium, you need to fill the bottom first. Combined with the numbers on the rows, that's your main source of deduction. And there are even more mechanics you'll encounter that render the game quite hard. Speaking of the difficulty, it varies greatly depending on whether you deactivate an option or not. By default, the game doesn't allow you to make mistakes; that is to say that if you click on a wrong cell, it will tell you that you can't put water in it. The "allow mistakes" option removes that, you'll never know when you make a mistake and puzzles become much harder. I think the game is far better played like that and that option should be the default. Especially for the main levels that are just ruined if the game directly tells you where you were wrong. The last level took me more than 2 hours because I tried until I had the correct logic, that's not possible if you know what you did wrong on the first try. I really liked the concept of the game, original with varied and small challenging levels. You also have a daily level and a random level generator if you want more (the insane difficulty is weird and will throw extremely easy levels sometimes though). Liquidum is a solid game (...), definitely worth it if you like advanced logic puzzles.

Liquidum is a really thought provoking puzzle game with a lot of content. Definitely worth puzzle fans playing this one!

《Liquidum》是一款挺有意思的类纸笔推理解谜游戏。 本作的核心规则出自Aquarium这一纸笔解谜题种，它的规则是：网格被一些线划分为不同的区域，而每个区域可以看成一个“水箱”，其中装有不同高度的水。水的分布必须满足静止时的水所满足的物理规律，即：1. 水的左、右、下方在无遮挡的情况下也必须有水；2. 连通的水具有相同高度的和空气的分界线。其中第2条规则是来源于现实中的连通器原理，不过现实中当然有不能直接套用连通器原理的情况，比如当两边上方的空气并不是连通的时候，水平面是有可能不一样高的，但在本作中你就不用考虑这个了。 原规则在这个规则基础上，也就只有网格外的指示线索，表明每一行/列包含的水格数。本作在这套规则的基础上，添加了一些拓展规则，比如可以斜着将区域分开的斜线，各种各样的局部和全局线索（如类似《Hexcells》里的“连续”线索，以及全局的水格数等），甚至还加入了可以在水面上停泊的船，船的摆放也需要满足一些线索的限制。挺有意思的。 本作的谜题大多数还是比较简单的，简单的1分钟，难一点的也可以5分钟，但是有个别谜题在我看来难度明显比其它谜题高很多，计算量很大，盯了半小时也不一定能看出破局的关键，比如4-8和6-7。在卡在6-7一个小时之后，我暂时决定认输，可能等以后接触了更多的解谜思路之后才能破解了。 本作有一些不错的UI设计，比如在鼠标悬停在某一格上时，自动显示如果这一格是水，那么还有其它哪些格子必须是水，将这种思维进行可视化，能很好地帮助玩家理解游戏的机制。不过本作也有一些有争议的设计，比如会像扫雷一样，在你填错格时告诉你你错了，这个虽然我个人感觉无伤大雅，但是有些玩家会觉得这样就损失了一部分自己查错的乐趣，这样做也让一些玩家能够很容易地“暴力”过关。好在可以在设置当中关闭这一点，你可以按照自己的喜好来调整。 总的来说是一款挺有意思的纸笔解谜游戏，感觉自己喜欢这种解谜的话可以试试。 结论：[b]推荐[/b]。

[b]TLDR[/b] Nonograms variant with simple “fluid mechanics”, a bit rough on the edges but touches all the bases of a puzzle game of this kind. [15/20⭐, 30h🏅, 3/5💡] [b]Context[/b] Often, when I play indie puzzle games, I wonder if the devs ever play their own games. That’s clearly not the case with Liquidum, where it’s clear from all the features that the devs actually enjoy playing solving the puzzles, even if the realisation of the ideas is not always ideal. [b]Writing[/b] There’s no plot, but the aquatic setting is that the puzzle grid is an aquarium that you need to fill. And sometimes there are boats. [b]Aesthetics[/b] The visuals are what you would expect from a game of this nature, although the interface gets cluttered at times with all the hints and other information. The night mode didn’t really work for me, as I couldn't distinguish the different line highlights and water fill previews. The soundtrack is just a track, from what I could tell, and gets tiring fast. [b]Gameplay[/b] The game initially plays like a Nonograms variant: you have to fill some cells of a grid given hints about the number of cells in rows/columns, whether they are continuous our separated, etc. But it has a twist: the cell content is liquid, so filled cells are kept at the same level horizontally, which provides an nice new layer of reasoning. As the game progresses more kinds of hints are introduced, like the number of filled areas of a certain dimension. On top of that, you may need to place boats on top of the water level, and those get a distinct set of hints. All these combinations of hints often result in challenging, but not very elegant, levels. In fact, level design is not a particularly strong aspect of the game, and I didn’t feel much of a difference between the main levels and those procedurally generated ([url=]Hexcells Infinite[/url] comes to mind, where the difference in quality was evident). Either way, very levels took more than 10mins to complete. But despite being a bit raw, it actually it checks all the boxes you’d expect from such deductive puzzle games: the level state is saved, there’s undo and redo, you can finish levels after mistakes but they get registered. Also, there are new daily levels, there are procedurally generated levels, there are workshop levels. Some thing that I found a bit annoying were either fixed by updates (e.g., could not mark no-water and no-boat simultaneously) or could be tweaked in the options (e.g., allowing mistakes instead of blocking them). [b]Value[/b] The main game, with ~50 levels, took me about 4h to beat. Then among daily levels, procedurally generated levels, and workshop levels, it took me another 12h to get all achievements. You revisit levels, and there are multiple progress slots. Achievements are connected to beating levels. There are daily levels, procedurally generated levels, and user-design levels, so replay value is as high as possible for such this kind of game. [b]Edit[/b] Since my initial review the game has received several improvements and the devs have tried to keep the community engaged. A new marathon mode was introduced and weekly marathon challenges are released (where I've found the toughest levels). There are also GUI improvements (like annotations, and clicking on hints to mark them as done), although it is still all a bit heavy-handed. There are new achievements related to the marathons and the free DLCs (which are now integrated in the main game), which took me additional 14h to complete. [quote][i]For more puzzle-game reviews and curated lists check out the [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43326007-The-Clueless-Adventurer-Puzzle-Trove/]Puzzle Trove[/url].[/i][/quote]

Encountered a very strange bug. When I first opened the game, the game window was very large, extending beyond the screen edges. But that's not a big deal: I can manually drag and resize the window to the desired size. The problem arises later. After playing a few levels and closing the game, reopening it results in the game window not displaying. I can see a thumbnail in the taskbar but cannot bring it to the foreground. I don't know how to fix this. I downloaded the Android version, but whenever I open the daily challenge, a dialog box appears saying "generating," and then the app crashes. 2024.5.15 Update I have resolved the issue—after the game starts, it scales down to a very small window in the top left corner of the desktop. You can manually resize it to an appropriate size. However, this can still be considered a bug. Additionally, the game's GPU usage is extremely high, my graphics card fan is spinning like crazy, as if it's running a AAA game, which is quite unusual for such a pure puzzle game.

I've never been a puzzle gamer, since I usually have a lot of difficulty to learn the mechanics, how things work, how I am supposed to solve the puzzle, then I get frustrated and move on to another game. But in Liquidum something that really caught my attention is how smooth the learning curve is. The game doesn't start with anything too complex, you see the water, you fill the squares and that's it. After some stages you start getting introduced to new mechanics, but one at a time. There is a lot of room between mastering a mechanic and getting to know a new one, and how you increasingly start applying what you've learned is what made this game different for me than other puzzles. The process of planing how you solve the puzzle in your head, plus using the markers on the stage, is something as gratifying as clearing a tough boss in a Souls game! And I believe I only got the encouragement to keep learning, thinking and trying to solve these puzzles thanks to the chill atmosphere and smooth planning of the stages progression. Thanks for getting me into puzzles, and if you haven't tried or doesn't like puzzle games you should give Liquidum a try.

Liquidum is a unique take on the standard logic grid puzzles and I had a blast playing through the campaign. But the best part of the game is the workshop and the leaderboards. You can build your own puzzles and play puzzles made by other players. Plus, there's a daily puzzle with a leaderboard so you can track the competition between yourself and your friends, or look at how you stack up across the globe. Add this to your must-have list of high-quality indie puzzlers. Right up there with Hexcells and Tiny Bubbles. Oh, and it's on Android too. Puzzle on the go if that's your jam. Need I say more?

So how different can a picross game become if you add on new mechanics? Quite a lot different, as Liquidum very competently demonstrates. Adding flow and gravity into the old formula may not change how the boards look too much, but it really changes how you need to look at them and think about them. With the mostly excellent level design, the game provides a set of refreshingly interesting puzzles, and some really infuriating moments when the player's deep ingrained picross thought patterns can't cope with even a relatively simple Liquidum situation. The implementation is nice, the visuals and the animations are smooth and soothing, and the music is also rather relaxing - up to 4-5 minutes, when it starts to feel very repetitive and it's best to turn it off. So many puzzle games do this - not sure why. But that's just a small detail. Overall, Liquidum is an excellent puzzle game, give it a try!

An addictive pure-logic game. Long after exhausting the puzzle levels, I'm still playing the daily puzzles, the weekly marathon, and generating endless puzzles to zone out on. There are multiple puzzle generators, using different rulesets and difficulties. If you like this kind of logic puzzle at all, you'll get a lot of value out of Liquidum.