Logic Bombs (2025)

It's rare enough that you come across a game that's only failing is not being an even more intrepid version of itself. It's fairly unusual to play through a game as cheap and accessible as Logic Bombs and walk away really trying to push it into the hands of your friends and family.

Logic Bombs is that game. Being a pure analogue logic puzzler, basically a mildly higher tech sudoku or picross cousin, tragically shrinks the market for it, but damn do I wish this could swim uphill and beat the odds.

I won't say that I don't respect you if you can't beat Logic Bombs (though I might think it), but I'll compare it on a spiritual level to another landmark title, Portal 1. Portal 1's key element is that it makes you feel smart when you solve a puzzle, despite the fact that most people can realistically beat it. Logic Bombs inverts that and makes you feel like you're getting smarter by working through it, like you've somehow elevated yourself by spending time on it.

A lot of breath is wasted on whether games are art, but here we have something aiming to be a genuine self improvement vehicle.

So if it's so special and unique, why isn't it 5/5? It's an incomplete article to a degree, though I appreciate that it doesn't continue to heap mechanics on you (sometimes you want a naked cake, the layers of icing doing just fine without the heaps on top), it very clearly does not stretch its mechanics. There's food left on the table, I suspect for some sort of expansion.

Additionally, the huge amount of puzzles is likely to unnecessarily filter out people who otherwise would have had the curiosity and thrust to beat a more perfectly paced game. I imagine this was done to give the player some breathers, but considering you pick and choose which puzzles to do, a player would likely be drawn to do all of the easy ones first and spoil the fun of pushing through the more difficult ones.

UI wise, the 'pure logic' theme with no internal puzzle numbering makes it hard to get assistance outside of the game, leaving the player to moderate their own use of the hint system as an alternative (which could end up completely spoiling some levels). It also makes it difficult to even know what puzzle you were on since you can hop in and out of them, like trying to find bits of shell in a meringue.

Finally, while I think there are some obvious directions for additional mechanics that didn't get explored, the proliferation of the algebra and delta mechanics really drove home how unfun they were to interact with. Having to do substitution algebra on paper is just an odd thing to have to do in a game (although perhaps impossible to avoid), but then having to keep in your head that X is 3 without being able to just set that reminder in game for yourself is a headache. Additionally, the much simpler delta mechanic requires you to keep counting rows over and over again. The former could be polished, the latter should have been in only a couple of the smaller levels (where it's easier to deal with) and then dropped once you get the more complex and larger levels.

I implore you to understand that that is all just a quipple though, enough to not be considered a top shelf title, but not enough to simply miss altogether. The best (and most true) compliment I can give MatthewMatosis' little game is that I wish everyone would be made to play it.

By force :)

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.