Another winner from "Matthew Brown" of Hexcells fame.
I enjoyed all the Hexcells games and picked this game up because of them. Being the titular squares, this game is even closer to the nonogram/Picross inspiration and base. But it has its own rules of course. If you're familiar with Picross puzzles, you can get tripped up by overlooking Squarecells' ruleset early on. But save for that, the first 3 or 4 levels of this game are super smooth sailings. You start to wonder just how short the game is. But the last two levels have a very welcome spike in difficulty. You find yourself falling back on familiar Picross approaches. But these puzzles are not defined by just those strategies. The extra rules that were added to the base Picross experience allow for very very linear and deliberate design. Finding that linear path is not easy. There are multiple singular roadblocks during the solving of the puzzles that are all a great delight to figure out. It's a welcome contrast to standard Picross where there's usually many branching paths to take and being stumped never lasts long. Here, you can be stumped for a long time trying to find that one puzzle step that gets you going again. And those roadblocks can happen just as often early as late during a puzzle.
Truly great puzzle design in the final third of the game. Just wish we had at least twice as many of those good ones. I'm a huge fan of short and compartmentalized puzzle games though so I'll take it!
Huge thumbs up.
[copied from my Steam review]
I enjoyed all the Hexcells games and picked this game up because of them. Being the titular squares, this game is even closer to the nonogram/Picross inspiration and base. But it has its own rules of course. If you're familiar with Picross puzzles, you can get tripped up by overlooking Squarecells' ruleset early on. But save for that, the first 3 or 4 levels of this game are super smooth sailings. You start to wonder just how short the game is. But the last two levels have a very welcome spike in difficulty. You find yourself falling back on familiar Picross approaches. But these puzzles are not defined by just those strategies. The extra rules that were added to the base Picross experience allow for very very linear and deliberate design. Finding that linear path is not easy. There are multiple singular roadblocks during the solving of the puzzles that are all a great delight to figure out. It's a welcome contrast to standard Picross where there's usually many branching paths to take and being stumped never lasts long. Here, you can be stumped for a long time trying to find that one puzzle step that gets you going again. And those roadblocks can happen just as often early as late during a puzzle.
Truly great puzzle design in the final third of the game. Just wish we had at least twice as many of those good ones. I'm a huge fan of short and compartmentalized puzzle games though so I'll take it!
Huge thumbs up.
[copied from my Steam review]