Having been a logic puzzle fan for many years, it surprises me that this is the first time I have played a mobile version of the common pen-and-paper puzzle.
Logic puzzles are essentially a grid of squares, that you must determine which squares need filling in, and which need to be left blank. Sometimes this takes the form of pairing up particular people, places and objects to form answers, or for more of a Picross (or Nonogram) feel to things, the filled and blank squares may form some sort of picture or design. These have been around for many years, long before Mario got his grubby little hands all over them. And now we have World Mosaics, by developers Fugazo, which is a fully competent, is somewhat flawed, interactive mobile version of the classic game.
First things first: a nonogram puzzle is a grid of squares, usually 5x5 or 10x10, or larger, depending on the activity. Each row and column has numbers listed outside of the grid, which correspond to how many of the squares in that row or column should be filled in. So if we have a 10x10 grid, and the first row has the number 10 listed along the left side of the row, we know that all ten boxes in that row will be filled. If the listed number were 3, 3, 2, for example, we know there would be three filled squares, than a gap, followed by three more filled squares, a second gap, and finally two more filled squares, to complete the row. While this shows the simplest form, some of these get more difficult later on, especially when the listed clues are all low numbers, and you have more guess work to employ to ensure you get the filled and blank squares in the correct place.
There are nearly 200 puzzles available in the game, with half of them being used in a “sort of” story mode, which is loosely based around the solutions being pictures of artefacts and special items and other such historical objects from across the globe. For fact lovers, such as myself, reading the descriptions on some of these things is actually part of the fun, but I know for many these screens of text will just be nuisances in the way of the next puzzle. The earlier puzzles, as stated earlier, begin as smaller 5x5 grids, and through the course of the game you work your way up towards the scarily impressive 20x20 grids. This is where my major problem with the game arises, particularly on the iPhone/iPod devices.
Some games are designed for a large interface, but will always have the ability to zoom in and out if needs be, and move the camera around to different areas of the screen: Angry Birds and Aiko Island are great examples of this. World Mosaics just doesn’t work with that functionality. You can’t zoom in to concentrate on only one part of the screen at a time, because the whole point of the game is that you are using all the information you have on the grid in front of you to try and solve the damn puzzle. There is an iPad version coming out later this month, which is more than likely to fix this issue, but on the smaller devices there is just no easy way of implementing your solutions. The buttons that move the cursor around are fine to a degree, particularly for smaller puzzles, but everything becomes too cluttered on larger puzzles.
