Logic Bombs (2025)

This is a kind of interesting recent puzzle game that I just have first impressions of here. It looks like some kind of wacky Picross variant as you have a grid with numbers on the edges and you're filling in squares or placing an X in them. However it is really not the same thing, first introducing a bunch of its own rules through some tutorial puzzles and then setting you loose on puzzles that are immediately quite hard in my opinion. It reminds me a bit more of the feeling of playing more complex variant sudokus that similarly add their own symbols and rules to a familiar format.

If you have done a lot of sudoku or Picross, you will know the concept of what to look for in terms of patterns that help you systematically eliminate possibilities and deduce the solution. Personally my initial taste of a bunch of post-tutorial puzzles felt like I was picking up on patterns but still not quite "clicking" with it. This ruleset didn't initially feel quite as simple and elegant as the kinds of puzzles I tend to enjoy, or at least for me it just felt very slow to figure out particularly in how you create boundaries around the grid. This is not helped by the fact that it doesn't seem you can mark guesses / possibilities, so you really have to juggle a lot in your head and re-check things repeatedly - I think the fact that this game was also deployed to a GameBoy ROM, while neat, has maybe overly limited it. You also have to continue to fill out the whole grid once you have figured the important part of the puzzle out, which seems sort of weird. The tutorials also confused me a bit at first with how possibly overly simply they are presented and rolled out.

The game is pretty cheap so I can recommend taking a look at it, and it's something I may return to one day when my caffeine is at maximum effectiveness, but I don't really feel like I'm a fan of it despite getting a few solid a-ha moments.