Gemsweeper

Daily PC Game Review Score: 8.5 / 10
Game Category: Casual - Puzzle 
Date: 6 Feb 2011

In today's world of casual games, a game of distinction is typically recognized for delivering high quality game play, possessing a wonderful story, and presenting bright and pleasing colorful graphics. More importantly however, since casual games are a dime a dozen proliferating game portals in huge numbers, game developers must uniquely poise their game on the market with some niche mechanic or unique game play to distinguish it from the daily crowd.

Gemsweeper from Lobstersoft fits the description of a game of distinction like a glove. More so if you love puzzles such as Minesweeper and Sudoku.

The basic premise of Gemsweeper is that you have to solve a series of nonograms puzzles as you make your way through, rebuilding the ruins of El Dorado. This game requires patience and brains so make sure you have bucketloads of both.

To put it simply, nongrams are a grid of squares with numbers at the top and left sides denoting which squares must be colored black by the puzzle player. A number of black squares is separated from another number of black squares by at least a white square. The puzzle would not be fun if you knew how many white squares there were... so instead it becomes the challenge for you to figure this out for yourself.

Beautiful panorama of a familiar looking Mayan ruin

There are two modes in Gemsweeper. Quest Mode puts you through a challenging series of 225 nonograms. Yes, you read that right... according to the developer, there are 225 nongrams ranging from the very simple 5 x 5 square grid to the whopping 30 x 30 killer puzzles.

Fortunately the tutorial, available from the main menu, is very informative and useful enough to teach you the basics of the game. Later on, as the grids back bigger, the tutorial returns to teach you more advanced tricks in helping you solve the harder puzzles.

Quest Mode is guided by your friendly mentor Professor McGuffog, who loves to make such funny jokes of the images you uncover when you solve a level. Alright, I know some of these are rather cringe-worthy pun-laden wisecracks, but it is truly hilarious to what the developers can think of next. Take for example, upon solving and uncovering the owl image - the Professor will quip, "Why did the owl say Tweet Tweet? Because he didn't give a hoot!"

Pay attention to the tutorial

The implementation of nonograms in Gemsweeper is excellent. Traditional 'black' squares hide colorful gems while 'white' squares are cursed tiles and should be destroyed with the hammer. Revealing a gem with a left click leaves behind a colored square that forms part of the final image - the color of the square does not have any game implications other than to help you visualise the final image.

If you feel daring enough, you can even assign the hammer to the right click mouse button. Once you do that, you can simply just hammer away at the blank squares (which saves you a lot of time as you don't have to toggle between the cursor modes).

Now what could this image be?

There are two ways you can make a mistake in Gemsweeper:

• You hammer at a gem and this causes it to shatter. Fortunately, you have 4 applications of super glue (denoted by the pots at the bottom of the screen shot).
• You click on a cursed tile. This deducts a penalty of a few seconds from your precious timer clock, so I don't think its wise to make too many of this type of mistake.

Fortunately for you, you have 4 hints available in every level. You can use the hint to tell you whether a square is a gem or a cursed tile. Using the hints however deprives you of the bonus of achieving a perfect solution - one in which all gems and cursed tiles are found correctly and no hints are used.

Almost done with stage 4 of the Arcade Mode... just a few more gems

Arcade Mode is a randomized game starting from a 5 x 5 square. You have to uncover enough gems to progress to the next level. At the next level, the square increases its dimensions by one which makes the game exponentially harder. You have the same number of super glue pots and hints as in Quest Mode.

One thing about the Arcade Mode, it does not have gradations to denote 5 x 5 areas like in the Quest Mode - these gradations make it easier to visually break down the grid into bite sized chunks. I have played as far as stage 9 but usually got careless because I counted the bunched up squares wrongly.

Here I am halfway through El Dorado

Gemsweeper is a great game to get. It's as addicitve as Sudoku and I consider it to be quite educational for kids. It definitely taxes your logical mind as you start out on the larger puzzles... but the end result as you complete these is truly something you can boast about. And when you are fresh out of puzzles, you can always resort to the endless Arcade mode... that is until Gemsweeper 2 is released.