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Puzzle Series Vol.5 - Slitherlinks


Jimboxy
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Puzzle Series Vol. 5 - First Impressions

This is the Fifth volume in the Hudson puzzle series covering a variety of games from suduko, kakuro, to picross and crosswords. This particular installment is "slitherlinks". The idea of the game is do draw a specific number of lines around a grid so that it matches the number contained within the grid. i.e if there is a 3 in a box you mark three of the lines and leave one empty. The number range from 0-3 with the rest of the boxes being left blank. In theory this sounds simple enough, however the trick with this game is making them all connect on one continuos line, this is where things begin to get tricky. You start on a 6x6 board and will probably have no idea where to start you line (i know thats what happened to me...) however there are certain rules which help you to eliminate parts of the board, for example if a box has a zero you know no lines can be touching it, if next to the zero there is a three, you know which part of the 3 has to be highlighted and so on and so forth.

The game contains 6x6 , 10x10, 18x10 and a massive 24x14 sized grids. At first it should take about 10-15 mins to beat the 6x6 puzzles, but once you have done a few you notice recurring patterns and can be finishing them in under a minute . The 24x14 puzzles can take a couple of hours to work though and if you find you have made a mistake, it is one hell of a task to find where you went wrong. So far i've found 10x10 and 18x10 to be a good size if you want something to kill 10-15 mins.

The game is Japanese, and seen as there is no plans to release an english language version, you will have to make do with bumbling though the menu's. It is relatively easy to navigate, everything is laid out in a similar way to Suduko gridmaster (that being the english port of Puzzle Series Vol.1) so if you have played that you will instantly feel at home. You are also awarded stars for completing boards in under a set time, this seems to level you up, but i've not figured out what it unlocks yet. Hopefully if a full English translation does turn up the game could revel a lot more surprises but for most it will be all about the puzzles.

Once in the game things are much more straight forward. The top screen is used for an overall view of your current puzzle and can be switched to a hints page. The bottom screen is where you place your lines on the grid. You can either put in a solid line, a ghost line or crosses in lines you defiantly cannot use. On the bottom right there is a series of buttons. One is to rotate the top screen, the other highlights the numbers you have completed and finally there is a menu/pause button. From what i can tell the game contains over 300 different boards, so to finish the lot will take some time.

A word of warning though, this game is more addictive than crack and coke zero combined, once you start a board, you will not be able to leave it until its finished. I would highly recommend it to anyone that enjoys logic puzzles.

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Until I played that demo on the Hudson site I still had no clue what you guys were going on about nor that Eurogamer review that gushed about it.

I really couldn't picture how it would work in my head at all.

I can see me getting really addicted to that!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Well after playing this for about 3 hours, I can confirm everything you've already read about it.

It's superb!

Still not a patch on Picross puzzles IMO, but a damn well earned second.

Shame the game is jap heavy, I'm sure there are many things I'm missing out on, but hopefully a translation will appear somewhere soon.

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