the runtime on some puzzles can run from 30 to even 45 minutes, which is a pretty substantial amount of time to lose should you have to close the game before finishing for some reason. The increased level complexity and lengths, especially toward the game's end, make the lack of a save-and-exit option much more confusing. It's unfortunately still not all glitter and gold, though. The blue cell numbers are in essence your line of defense against grids with an abundance of crossed cells without information. They are almost never giving excess information in Plus and they way that they reveal the grid is decidedly different than the column rules. This is great because there are now even more ways for the rules to interact and create those zones of mutuality and mutual exclusion I touched on in my Hexcells review. This is compounded by the sole major mechanical addition to Plus: occasionally, a blue marked cell will have a number on it indicating how many other blue cells are in a two-cell radius. This ambiguity is perfect because it makes you rely more on other areas of the puzzle, and it also allows for more secondary restraints without making the solution too obvious. In the original Hexcells this was an excess of usable information and made some puzzles trivial in execution. The first new wrinkle you'll notice is not every crossed out cell gives you the information about the surrounding cells. While it retains 100% of the visual and audio elements of the previous installment, making it more akin to a mere level pack, the new mechanics introduced in Plus as well as much more thoughtful overall puzzle design make this a pretty substantial improvement over the original. Plus is best framed as the second "act" of the Hexcells saga, and where the series really found its footing mechanically. Hexcells Plus is the second game in the series of Minesweeper-esque logic puzzles, and its close release proximity to the original tells you most of what you need to know: the people wanted more, and they wanted it harder. Even so, this is a fantastic little puzzle game that really tests you at points yet remains fun to pick apart even when things get really tricky. I feel like especially for this, the counter should have been increased before it stopped you getting maximum score, as this would still have stopped people from simply randomly clicking their way through without feeling so unnecessarily punishing. My only issue is that I feel that the mistake counter is still a pain, even moreso now that the game requires you to think in these more complex ways while also performing them on bigger boards, making it a bit stressful since you know that it could make you have to go back and tediously input everything again. As such, people who are in this for the calmer experience get more or less the same time investment for this sort of content here, but then have the option of tackling these more difficult puzzles if they so choose.Īs before, I also love how at no point does the game actually require guesswork, and while certain approaches ultimately make the player think many steps ahead in some creative ways, it makes it all the more satisfying once you figure out what needs to be done, perform the plan, and then realise that the puzzle now completely falls into place. While one could argue that this detracted from the more casual experience that Hexcells states that it wants to offer, I still feel like it serves this purpose rather well, with some of the earlier levels still being really chill while taking a bit longer, and only the later stages ramping things up to the incredible degree that it does. Overall I enjoyed this game a lot more, with the puzzles almost always requiring a couple bits of higher order logic to actually complete the puzzles, making it overall way trickier and take more focus. Basically take the original Hexcells, add more levels, make them a ton harder, and add a couple more mechanics to provide further complexity to the puzzles, and you've got Hexcells Plus.
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