+ Guessing is never required
+ Gradually introduces new techniques, good difficulty curve
+ Soothing, zen ambiance

- Ends too early before the challenge really ramps up

Clever little minesweeper/picross kinda hybrid that carries a gentle vibe that's absolute bliss to the ears, as you make the hex cells go blue, then make a single mistake and lose your shit.

For real, a simple and really great puzzler. If only it were longer though! Fortunately there are sequels, but I feel blueballed at how it was just about peaking, and then just ends when the puzzles get really good. A lot of the game is easing you into new mechanics, which does keep things fresh but only in the final world does it really feel like an ultimate test of what you've learned over the very brief experience - a little over 2 hours at most, I found it.

Still, for the low price of like, $3 (even better on sale)? If you like puzzles at all, absolutely grab this.

I have the feeling that an important ingredient in Hexcells taste is in the familiarity of the base, half minesweeper, half sudoku (some say Picross, but I don't know it first hand). It’s simple to understand because the rules are always simple. The interest escalates quickly by taking advantage of handmade levels where the positioning is carefully considered to the detail, so that you never need to guess while you still need to slowly examine all the hints to advance without failing.

The great understanding of space is as important as the great understanding of rhythm. In just one hour, the game achieves tranquility, which is clearly pointed at in its visual and sound style, through an impeccable complete concentration. When you realize, you've gone through the whole game in a single one-hour session.

This is what Plus fails to understand from the get go. It's not a bad premise to begin from where the original left off, throwing much harder levels early on. But the Plus isn’t only in the difficulty but also in the size and length. What used to be a concentrated session is now a collection of huge, tedious levels where you spend too much time counting, not deducting, and where you keep tabbing out frequently to clear your mind, something unthinkable in the first one. Even worse are the new hints. The hints with question marks may still have some grace depending on their positioning, however the hints that tell you how many blue hexes are there in a range, represented by an area that looks terrible and hard to read often, multiply the already tiring counting by having to count again, now in circles. And that without going into the levels that rely on this new idea essentially.

That infinite Hexcells games can be made was obvious. That a key essence from the first one was to be concise and not needing anything else, not so much it seems.

This is a really neat little cross between nonograms and Minesweeper and I'm all for this sort of stuff as a way to just wind down a bit with some music on in the background. The systems in place are all really lovely and intuitive as well, while undoubtedly adding a lot of depth to make each stage feel more satisfying. It's also pretty interesting to compare this to nonograms in the sense that the dynamic almost feels reversed, as while in those, you tend to celebrate whenever you find where a new square is, in Hexcells, being able to find an empty space ends up feeling way more satisfying.

The whole casual angle that was approached here is one that I both appreciate but also find detracts from the game at the same time. I love the way that every puzzle here is 100% solvable using nothing but pure logic, eliminating the often frustrating element of guesswork in Minesweeper, but also found most of the material here to be a bit too simplistic until the end. It almost feels as if most of the game is attempting to prepare you for the upcoming challenges, only to then give you about 4 levels of more challenging content. This also leads me to the complaint that I feel that this is far too short, taking only an hour or two to get through all the content this game has to offer. As a final issue, I found myself getting extremely annoyed at being punished whenever I made a misclick, which happened extremely often and had me repeating some puzzles numerous times, which got pretty tedious even when I took a screenshot of my progress and just copied it. The issue with this is that I totally understand why it's in place, as it is able to stop people from simply guessing and clicking at random to get through a tricky section, but it just feels so irritating when accidentally clicking in the wrong spot when momentarily distracted is just an instant redo.

In any case, this is still the sort of puzzle game I can get down with, very simple, yet effective mechanics that work well together and make for a nice little deduction game. If there was more content to this and it required a few more moments of much higher order thinking and logic, I think this would be great, but as it stands, it's merely just good, I'll see whether the other games in the series help with this problem