Before a couple days ago, if a grizzly vagabond accosted me and started ranting that 2 plus 3 equals orange, or that yellow and blue make seven, I would have privately made some conclusions about his sanity and made a tactful withdrawal. But now that I have played a certain color and number based puzzler from Candystand, I would realize that this person has been playing Logica. I would also know why he was crazy, for Logica is fiendishly, maddeningly difficult, enough to push even the sanest, most well-adjusted grizzly vagabond over the brink.
The core concept is simple enough. Each level sports a field of Wheel-of-Fortune-style tiles, and occasionally some sort of hint or other accoutrements. Clicking on the tiles reveals a colored keyboard-key with a number on it from 1 to 9, and you can usually cycle through the various numbers and colors embedded in each tile. Each number is always matched with the same color, and every tile contains only a certain set of numbers. You will quickly learn these associations and limitations, and internalizing them is important to solving the puzzles.
The goal is to follow the instructions each level provides, and sometimes the point of the puzzle is in figuring out what those instructions are. There are three tiers of difficulty with ten levels each, plus a useful five level tutorial. If you defeat five levels in one tier, you can move on to the next. Steel yourself if you choose to do so, because Logica doesn't coddle.
Analysis: I like puzzle games to have a solid theme and a mechanic that doesn't require a lot of extra stuff on the periphery, and here Logica delivers. It's amazing how easily I learned to start adding colors and associating them with numbers, like I imagine a synesthete might. The persistent use of this mechanic and the keyboard-key look reminds me of the presentation of a Bart Bonte game.
The look of the game is not as slick as a Bonte project, but it's serviceable. The navigation is a little clumsy. There never is any indication of what level you are on, and you have to go back to the level menu each time you complete a puzzle, instead of immediately navigating to the next. However, it is easy to tell what levels you have completed, which is important as you will likely have to skip between levels quite frequently.
Yes, the difficulty. Maybe it's all the M&M's and pudding cups I've been binging on, but on the Medium and Hard puzzles especially, I found myself veering between successfully solving after a satisfying bit of consideration, and being completely addlepated and dumbfounded. It shames me to admit how often I had to consult the walkthrough Candystand provides, but even this was of limited utility, as it merely reveals the answers without explaining the logic behind them. On seeing some solutions I thought, "Not sure I would have come up with that, given the sugar high I'm on, but I must admit that is one clever puzzle. Well played, Logica!" Yet on others I could only think in disjointed waves of purple bewilderment and red frustration. An opaquely difficult puzzle is one in which the solution sows more confusion than the original puzzle.
Even the puzzles I did solve did not always make me happy. I want to make clear that there were many puzzles with nice, logical, satisfying solutions. A few rely on prior knowledge of other sorts of puzzles, though that isn't a huge problem. But several puzzles, I am pretty sure, relied on narrowing the field of solutions and brute-forcing them until one worked. One involves an impossible degree of visual acuity that I could only solve by screen-capturing the game and zooming in. I don't find these contortions fun; I find them tedious.
I'm being harsh on a minority of puzzles, and it's enough that it detracts from the experience. But there is still a good gameplay experience here. At it's best, when the difficulty curve isn't a wall, Logica provides several excellent puzzles. The theme is good, the concept well-conceived and usually the puzzles are clever and a solid application of the concept. But if you find yourself on the street, shouting that Neptune is blue, except that it's red, don't say you weren't warned.
Walkthrough Guide
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Logica Hint-through
These are hints for each level - not full solutions.
Training-1:
If you really need a hint, well, try clicking on the squares…see how they turn into "1's"?
Training-2:
The missing square is movable.
Training-3:
You can click multiple times on a square to change its color.
Training-4:
When a red line and a yellow line cross, what color do you think the intersecting square will be?
Training-5:
More color addition for you…what color would you get when you mix a red "2" square and a yellow "3" square?
Easy-1:
Be positive…hmm…maybe something symbolic of your positive outlook? Forget numbers and colors for just a moment - it'd be a plus.
Easy-2:
S, blank, U, V…what could possibly go in that blank?
Easy-3:
Okay, back to colors…
Easy-4:
If you got Training-3, this should be a snap.
Easy-5:
Okay, look at those lines. Pretend they're parts of a circuit. You might think about assembling them alongside the grid of boxes so that you can complete a circuit of each color using lines and boxes. But that's just my suggestion.
Easy-6:
Stop clicking so gosh-darned fast and pay attention to what the scrolling message to the right is telling you.
Easy-7:
All right, you need one path connecting the reds, one path connecting the yellows, one path connecting the blues. One guess what colors the intersections are.
Bonus hint:
There's one purple, one orange, and two green boxes in the solution.
Easy-8:
Start in the middle and pay close attention to the directions. Too much pressing will get you in trouble.
Easy-9:
That lonely box moves.
Easy-10:
We just practiced drawing one of the letters you'll need.
Medium-1:
Okay, look, have you noticed yet how when you click a square you get both a letter AND a number? No? Really want to keep playing this game, do you?
Medium-2:
I'd DIE for a solution to this one.
Medium-3:
Math time. You've got operations along the top and the side. Now, to what might those operations apply? Hey, look at that grid of numbers below…
Medium-4:
Lift the blinds and let in a little light. And some more contrast might help too…
Medium-5:
I see numbers, I see colors, I see they're the same thing… What do you get when you add yellow and red? What do you get when you add green and green?
Medium-6:
Okay, this one's cute. Remember, there's the color OF the clue, and the color IN the clue. Don't ignore either unless you're told to.
Bonus hint:
Which clues apply to which boxes? Which month of the year is September? How many corners does the Earth have (thanks ray9na!)?
Medium-7:
This one's kind of complicated.
Don't just start moving stuff around! Click, then think, then move!
You need to fill in the missing boxes in the sequence from 0-9; the movable boxes below fill in those gaps (spaces 1, 2, 7 and 8).
Which movable box goes where? Well, that depends on the box to the left of each movable box (hope you didn't start moving them around already).
Only one box to the left of a movable box can be made an "8," so put the corresponding movable box in the "8" position…get the idea?
I'll let you take it from here…
Medium-8:
Count? What is there to count?
Lots of sevens here…seven boxes, seven words, seven possible colors…
Medium-9:
Does the layout of those keys, er, boxes remind you of anything?
Medium-10:
BOOM! Wish I'd placed some flags around those red squares…
Hard-1:
Go look at the hint for Easy-7.
Hard-2:
Make sure you label your axes correctly before you start plotting points.
Hard-3:
Okay, look at those instructions. Clearly, your starting point needs to be one square to the left and two squares down from one of the blank spaces in the grid. Wait, that wasn't obvious?
Up turns with you.
Hard-4:
This is a multistage puzzle, and the first stage does NOT involve clicking. Just get your hand off your mouse and think for a moment.
On each row we have a colored letter, some boxes, and a number. Notice any sort of correlation between the color of the letter and the boxes?
If you figured out the last hint, this one should make sense: the numbers on the left indicate which element of each row you will need.
Put it all together, and THEN you can follow the instructions to solve the level…
Hard-5:
18, 5, 4…I'll need my decoder ring to solve this puzzle.
Hard-6:
Okay, remember Medium-9? Those keys, er, boxes can spell stuff…
Wouldn't it be keen if what they spelled was the right color?
Not enough letters? Well, one can do double duty, but it will add up…
Hard-7:
You're going to have to go back to the Easy puzzles if you can't get this one. No shame in it.
When you come back, you might need to scramble a bit to catch up.
Hard-8:
Just trace my steps and you'll do fine…
Hard-9:
Okay, these puzzles are crazy, but this one's a puzzle craze.
Bonus hint:
It helps that not every box can be every number.
Hard-10:
This isn't picross, sorry. Close, but no.
By this point, your eyes might have started blurring boxes of the same color together. Luckily, that will help here.
Posted by: Fritware | January 15, 2010 1:00 PM