• Splotches
  

  8 hours playtime

  no achievements

This is a puzzle game. Each level is a grid with different colors placed on different tiles, and you click-and-drag a color to spread it onto other tiles. If two primary colors overlap, they become a secondary color; if a secondary color overlaps with its ingredients, it stays the secondary color; and if a secondary color mixes with its opposite primary color, it explodes (clearing all tiles in range). On top of the usual color wheel colors, there’s also white (can overwrite or be overwritten by any color) and black (results from mixing two secondary colors; can’t be spread). The goal is to blow up the rainbow sphere in each level without blowing up a mine.

This is one of those games that gives you a star-rating upon beating a level: one for winning, one for using less than a certain number of explosions, and one for beating it within the time limit. If you know puzzle games, you’ll know how laughable that last objective is since you can always redo the level after solving it if you didn’t get that star the first time. To make up for this, a few levels drop the puzzle aspect of the game and turn it into a mouse-maze action game (where there’s only a couple colors and you have to drag them quickly to the rainbow sphere), then the levels promptly go back to being puzzles right afterward. I would’ve preferred if these levels weren’t here because they don’t mesh with the puzzle aspect of the rest of the game at all (being really easy to “solve”) and aren’t common enough to be built on properly.

In contrast, if you beat the level over the target number of explosions, you’ll actually have to go back and re-think your solution if you want that star, which is what puzzle games should be about. Unfortunately, the game never tells you what this number is until after you beat a level (c’mon, even the time limit has a clock at the top of the screen), so part of the game is just trying to anticipate where you can reduce explosions. Even with that, most of the game is still really easy. There will be the occasional tricky one every now and then, but at least 2/3rds of the stages won’t make you stop and think for more than a few seconds. In fact, there are a few levels where you can easily just sequence-break them and get well under the minimum explosions needed for that star. Some levels may seem tricky at first, but then you’ll notice some white paint nearby that makes everything way easier. The tricky ones do get more consistent as the game progresses, but the only ones that really had me stumped were 87 and 119 (I even ended up using the hint for 119, though I have a nitpick with it since it wasn’t the blue-orange combination that got the key; all that did was clear the path for the red-green combination to get the key, which–admittedly–was what I was missing. I do appreciate the hint not outright telling you what to do, though).

Overall, this game is okay. The mechanics work fine and there are some tricky puzzles here, but there’s also quite a bit of fluff you gotta go through to reach them. Wait for a sale.

P.S. Level 31 and 32 are literally exactly the same; there’s not even a subtle difference to make you rethink it slightly.