Patterna

[u]In short:[/u] Patterna is a challenging hard-logic puzzle game with a steep learning curve. The mechanics are varied and the replayability infinite, but it is very rough around the edges with poor and sometimes frustrating implementation. If you have a low tolerance for bad UI, stay away. If you can stomach that and are a seasoned veteran of logic games, Patterna is well worth buying at full price. [u]In long:[/u] The developer himself compares Patterna's [b][u]mechanics[/u][/b] to Hexcells, and one can immediately see the inspiration. But Patterna is far from a knock-off, does its own thing and expands gameplay well beyond the scope of Hexcells. Nodes may be revealed or not, may be part of a pattern or not, may carry information about nodes around them up to a distance of 3, may describe the length of the chain they are part of, may have up to 4 colors, may be unlinked, linked or directionally linked, etc. The complexity is smart and truly awe-inspiring, but comes at a cost: The learning and [b][u]difficulty[/u][/b] curve is very steep and almost nothing about the game seems intutive at first. Minesweeper and Hexcells have a simple elegance that is completely missing in Patterna. Right out of the gate you are inundated with new and abstract terminology ("pattern nodes" vs. "non-pattern nodes") and the tutorial is lacking. From my understanding there used to be a more concise tutorial, but after expanding the game it has been spread out across several level packs. To me it appeared slow, disjointed and partly out of order. To be fair, the game offers pretty much every assistance you can think of: You can mark up to four nodes, which tints all nodes affected by them in different colors and you can switch to a planning mode, where you can temporarily mark nodes. These tools are almost required to use, since especially directional edges tend to produce some counter-intutive results. The [b][u]levels[/u][/b] are a bit of a mixed bag. There are dozens of pre-made levels (took me about 12h to clear), organized in several sequences, but they mostly left me cold. A good chunk was very easy tutorials, a few were smart and fun and the rest were either focussed on mechanics I didn't enjoy or giganting sprawling mazes of directional edges, which basically required trial and error in planning mode, because there wasn't enough information to solve them step-by-step. But as even the developer has acknowledged on the forums, the pre-made levels were never intended to be the core of the game - the random level generator is! In fact, there are several different ones, which produce different kinds of node graphs. All generators are highly customizable in terms of size, difficulty and mechanics. It is actually incredibly impressive, how much variety and challenge they can produce. My only gripe is, that the difficulty settings are just very rough guides. Even low settings can occasionally produce incredibly complicated relationships requiring several minutes of high level reasoning. But in general the level generators are definitely one of the best I've ever seen and in over 50 hours of playtime with them I've never had the feeling anything repeated or that I had already seen all patterns. There is also a level editor, but Steam Workshop support is partly broken and years after the release there are a grand total of 6 levels published. Which brings us to the implementation, and here arguably the game starts to fall apart quite a bit. The [b][u]graphics[/u][/b] are barely passable, albeit completely functional. The Unity loader takes care of resolutions and windowed mode (window can also be drag-resized). I really like the [b][u]sound[/u][/b] effects and the music is decent (although naturally it will get old after 10 hours). The [b][u]horrible UI[/u][/b] is one of the game's biggest weak points though. It is needlessly complicated and very overwhelming to someone who starts up the game for the first time. The main menu is just an overlay over the gameplay, which leads to strange behaviour, like being able to zoom the main menu background. Functionalities you'll often need are buried as deep in menus as ones you'll never use. Double click doesn't start a level, only the "play" button does. There's a neat graphical statistic at the end of each level that stopped working as soon as I started with randomly generated levels - but it still shows the meaningless data from dozens of hours ago everytime I beat a level. The ingame statistics keeping in general has very little useful data (level times seem to count intro and outro animations, some achievement related metrics are never shown, etc). I disagree with a lot of default choices, but the vast settings menu allows for amazing customization, from marking colors and depths to reversing controls and turning off certain animations. It took some time, but I was able to satisfy a lot of my needs. Some problems remain: If a hint is completely done, the game kicks you out of having it marked (jarring, but helpful), but does not automatically grey it out (why?). Every level starts and ends with a drawn out animation of every single node flying into and out of the screen. While neat at first, I found it to be enormously frustrating being forced to stare at the screen for 15 seconds for the literal 1000th time, when I just want to play the next level. Speaking of staring at the screen, there are a few pretty bad [b][u]bugs[/u][/b]: Every half hour or so the game just freezes up for 10-20 seconds and becomes completely unresponsive, before continuing as if nothing happened. And after finishing a pre-made sequence you are kicked back to the main menu where a "continue level" button is still active, which reproducibly hardlocks/crashes the game. Together with the deprecated Workshop support, Patterna does not seem well maintained to me. In [b][u]conclusion[/u][/b] this is a pretty classic example of a first release from a one-man operation. Patterna's developer definitely had a good idea and a firm grasp of mathematics/graph theory, but everything outside his skill-set, like graphics and UI, turned out to be pretty lacking if not awful. Still, the core gameplay is very solid and has infinite replayability. If you are bored by other logic games and you think you've seen it all, Patterna will rack your brain and keep you occupied for dozens of hours and the above-average asking price is very fair for that. Despite all its faults, I've had a lot of fun and don't regret my purchase one bit. If, however, you are new to logic games or if you value a polished experience, I cannot it good conscience recommend Patterna to you.

Very nice puzzle game. Very "logical", need a LOT of reasoning and you never have to guess what your next move should be. It may be a bit too "technical" and complicated for many people and the graphics can be a little too "terse", but the game is better than it looks. Definitely suggested if you liked minesweeper but hated when you had to randomly guess where to click.

I do like a puzzle game and this is a stunner...similar in some ways to Hexcells but certainly provides more than a challenge...there is a learning curve that certaily gets steeper as more and more @features@ are added to the game...relaxing and interesting!

I love the variety, am mostly playing random smaller levels. There's larger levels if you want a challenge.

Very challenging and rewarding puzzle game. Comparing this game with Hexcells is very much justified, as both games follow the same concept: You have to figure out which nodes (=cells) on the board belong to a pattern and which don't. New information may be uncovered in the process, allowing you to progress further. The puzzles are designed to be solved by pure reasoning, i.e. at any point there is at least one logical next step that can be deduced without guessing. Figuring out that next step may be very difficult, though. Compared to Hexcells, this game is more complex and difficult. Nodes are not related simply by lying next to each other, but may be connected freely by edges. Some of the rules are rather complicated and may be confiusing at first, and the difficulty ramps up pretty quickly even during the tutorial. It took me well over 20 hours to perfect all included levels. The game includes Steam workshop support, but as of now there is virtually no user-generated content. The random level generator can create some pretty decent puzzles, though, when the parameters are properly tweaked. Edit: One day after posting this the tutorial has been completely overhauled. Instead of throwing all game mechanics at you in the course of some 50 levels new concepts are now introduced gradually, one by one. This should make the game a bit more accessible to new users.

This is a masterpiece, I won't need another puzzle game for a LOOOOOONG time, maybe even forever, I feel in love

An enjoyable puzzle game, Patterna kept my attention for dozens and dozens of hours. You need to determine which cells are or are not marked as part of 'the pattern' based on given distribution/adjacency information, somewhat akin to Minesweeper or Hexcells. Like the latter of those, all puzzles are set up in a way that you never strictly need to make a random guess. The thing that's really singular about Patterna in my view is the robustness of the random level generator. I was able to find settings that generated interesting random puzzles more often than not. The only issue is that sometimes the chain of reasoning was difficult enough that I needed to break out pen and paper and brute force the next move, which generally felt more like bookkeeping than entertainment. On the whole, though, the game did a good job of hitting a reasonable middle ground of difficulty.

This is exactly what it says it is and looks like. Every word in the short blurb up there is completely true. There's a generous demo available. But what you can't see from the screenshots is that the sound design and music are both excellent.

Beautiful complex deduction. This is my most favorite puzzle game and one of the best along with SpaceChem. A must-get for puzzle fan. One big thing i love about this game compared to hexcells series is that " a puzzle's size does not need to be large to be defined as difficult". (though it's true :D)

Vždycky, když vidím logickou hru, doufám, že bude stejně kvalitní jako série Hexcells. Protože tohle dílo je naprosto fantastické a uhranulo mi. Hra Patterna na stránkách obchodu avizuje, že se právě touto sérií inspirovala. Je ale také tak dobrá? [h1]Ráj pro milovníky logických her[/h1] Nebudu chodit kolem horké kaše a rovnou povím, že není dobrá. Je přímo úžasná. Je to takový vlhký sen každého milovníka logických her. Princip je úplně stejný jako u Hexcells. Máte herní plochu a na ní musíte rozhodnout, jestli tam ty části patří nebo ne. Vše jde krásně odvodit, takže nemusíte tipovat. A co víc, pokud hra ví, že info o některých částech nemůžete ještě vědět (= sprostě tipujete), zprvu vás jemně varuje, ale napodruhé vám to již započítá jako chybu. Oproti sérii Hexcells tu máte ale o dost více faktorů, které musíte brát v potaz. Zpočátku to jsou jen čísla, která se později nachází i v závorkách a tím se mění jejich význam. K tomu si přidejte ale i linky udávající směr ovlivnění a barvy a je zaděláno na problém. I ta nejtěžší hádanka v Hexcells Infinite vypadá proti těm v téhle hře jako procházka růžovým sadem. [h1]Hexcells na druhou[/h1] Jelikož považuji Hexcells za špičku v žánru, chrochtám u tohoto titulu blahem. Ona inspirace není jen sprostým vykrádáním, ale naleznete tu i hromadu vlastních a zajímavých nápadů. Tutoriál je opravdu obsáhlý a nabízí přes padesát (!!!) levelů, které vám postupně vysvětlují a kombinují jednotlivé principy. Poté se můžete vrhnout na úrovně, které vytvořili autoři hry nebo zavítat do workshopu pro levely vytvořené uživateli Steamu. A pokud by vám ani to nestačilo, můžete si nechat náhodně vygenerovat level. Zde je HROMADA voleb, co si lze nastavit, od obtížnosti, velikosti herní plochy, tak i její tvar atd. Kromě toho se zde nachází i pro masochisty parádní Hardcore mód. Určitě byste uhádli, jakou má (ne)výhodu. Jakmile uděláte jedinou chybičku, celá hádanka se ukončí. [h1]Ne tak minimalistická[/h1] Zpočátku mi trochu vadilo grafické zpracování hry, které sice neruší od řešení hádanek, ale uvítal bych něco čistšího po vzoru právě Hexcells. Jenže i v tomto případě by to stejně nefungovalo, jelikož tu jsou barvy a hra vám sděluje hromadu informací, které musíte umět zpracovat a vhodně z toho vyvodit závěr. Na grafickou stránku hry jsem si tedy velmi rychle zvykl, stejně tak hudba je parádní, nijak neruší a hraje na pozadí. Kromě toho také levelujete svůj profil a získáváte nějaké bonusy. Já jsem zatím level osm, takže nemám žádné bonusy. I tak je to ale příjemná věc. Tutoriál je také dobrý, jen díky hromadě informací a angličtině může nastat problém, kdy některé levely budete opakovat, jelikož jste nepochopili daný postup a proč se děje to, co se děje. Levely je samozřejmě možné hrát neustále dokola a máte tu i indikaci toho, zda jste jej splnili bez chyby. Což je věc, o kterou by se měl každý hráč snažit, že ano. [h1]Extrémní hra a extrémní nadšení[/h1] Od té doby, co jsem objevil sérii Hexcells, jsem toužil po něčem podobném. A teď, po pár letech, jsem to našel. Patterna navazuje na odkaz této báječné logické série, přidává hromadu vlastních věcí a celé to působí naprosto úžasným dojmem. Hra je to mnohdy až neuvěřitelně těžká, ale o to více si budete vážit každého splněného levelu bez jediné chybičky. Díky generátoru si navíc můžete nastavit levely dle vašeho vlastního uvážení a hrát tak ty, které nejsou ani příliš lehké a ani příliš těžké. Bonusem na závěr je pak cena, která je směšně nízká. Tohle je totiž zábava na několik desítek nebo stovek hodin. [h1]Plusy[/h1] + návyková hratelnost + působí jako vylepšená verze série Hexcells + obtížnost + generování levelů, které lze přizpůsobit vašim choutkám + podpora Workshopu + audiovizuální zpracování + nízká cena vzhledem k délce hry [h1]Mínusy[/h1] - místy opravdu frustrující obtížnost - nutná znalost angličtiny [h1]Konečný verdikt[/h1] [b]Mé hodnocení: 10/10[/b] Doporučuji všem příznivcům logických her, zvlášť těm, kteří milují sérii Hexcells. Rozhodně se jedná o jednu z nejlepších her v daném žánru.