Mega Mosaic

台独只配这个评价

I can't be certain how much the game has changed from its earlier state when folks were asking for some QOL features, but I do know that Mega Mosaic walked so that Proverbs could fly. I bought this game after enjoying Proverbs as much as I did, and this is a definite recommend, though I don't think enjoying proverbs will necessarily indicate enjoyment here. Lack of a coherent theme + logically connected sections (that is, the borders of the sections don't divide the squares from each other) means this one sort of melts into the background more easily. If you obsessively played Proverbs, this is more of that good fix. If, however, you played proverbs like a normal person, I don't know that this earlier entry into the genre will be nearly as enjoyable. Since I am insane, this was pretty dang enjoyable. But part of what I did to make it fun was use a little more deductive reasoning than I might have done otherwise. If I were only looking to follow the logic of 'fill in the remainder of the 3x3' or 'block off the remainder of the 3x3' (the first-order problem solving logic someone in the community hub appeared to have determined is all that is required to solve this game) I would have characterized it as a waste of time and a game for babies. Instead it's a waste of time and a game for... toddlers? I don't know, but it's good and I look forward to playing more of Mark Ffrench's mosaic games.

台毒狗 司马东西

A puzzle game you simply cannot step away from until you realize you've already spent hours playing. The core mechanic is easy to understand because all you have to do is color squares according to the rules. Some tiles within the grid contain numbers, while the rest have to be solved through logic. Each number tells you how many tiles in the surrounding 3 by 3 area, including the numbered tile itself, need to be colored with the light color. The easiest numbers to solve are 0 and 9. A number 0 means there are no light colored squares in that area, so every surrounding tile should be marked with the dark color using the right mouse button. A number 9 means every tile in the area should be colored light with the left mouse button. Once those are done, you can move on to nearby numbers and count how many light tiles are already in place. If a number already has enough light tiles around it, you can safely mark every remaining tile as dark. What really drew me in is that the entire game is one massive puzzle that lets you freely zoom in and out, focusing on whichever section you want. At the same time, the sheer size can feel overwhelming, especially because there are very few quality of life features. The game offers a hint system that quickly jumps to a tile you can solve easily or use as a starting point. If you make too many mistakes, an error message appears, and you can use a button to erase every incorrectly colored tile. Unfortunately, there is no undo option or a way to lock tiles you've already solved. That became frustrating more than once because a single accidental click on a completed section can undo part of your progress. Finishing the entire puzzle is a serious commitment. After playing for around two hours, I had completed only about 5 percent of the map. One feature I really liked is that every time you finish a region, it fills with color and reveals part of a hidden image, which makes the long journey feel much more rewarding.

This one is MUCH slower and harder to find the path forwards so maybe start with proverbs or the egypt one if you're just beginning. They're very satisfying though. Not difficult in the slightest, but mentally stimulating. I like this series a lot :)

Mega Mosaic is a Minesweeper-esque puzzler where the gimmick is that you are working on one giant grid. As you complete segments they are replaced with pixel art that ends up forming a colorful mosaic. I enjoy chill puzzle games like this, particularly when there is a set goal and a s good sense of progression. Interestingly enough, I found the greatest sense of progression came from feeling myself get a deeper understanding of the game's mechanics and becoming better able to infer which squares to highlight. At first my play was quite stuttered, figuring out a few sequences of squares then moving to another area, looking for new starting points. Eventually my brain started being able to juggle longer hypothetical "If this one is highlighted, then these 3 can't be, which means one of these two must be" scenarios. Having said that, even after getting much, much better at logical deduction, by the end I still felt like I was occasionally guessing and hoping for the best. Just occasionally, though! Luckily, the game is not too punishing when you make mistakes. If you start to stack mistakes on top of each other, the game will give you the option to wipe out your mistakes (as well as any correctly-identified squares within a limited radius), so you don't have to worry about messing up a long series of choices then trying to figure out where the mistakes started. In fact, if you highlight or rule out too many squares around a number, it will immediately turn red, letting you know something is amiss. I believe you can disable these helpful features, but I couldn't imagine playing without them. I'm actually kind of shocked by how much time I put into Mega Mosaic overall, but it was great to play while I watched videos on another screen, and despite the hours I put into it the chill music never felt repetitive and was consistently relaxing. The pixel art is colorful and charming, but it unlocks at a fairly slow rate (by design). Oh, and there is no correlation between the highlighted/disabled square formations and the underlying images. This ain't Picross. Interestingly, as I was playing I thought "Wouldn't it be neat if, after I complete the puzzle, I could watch a time laps of the entire grid being filled in? I'd bet that would look like a virus spreading". To my surprise, I was presented with exactly that feature upon completing the game (and yes, it looks like a virus spreading). If you like logical number-based deduction puzzles, Mega Mosaic offers a good challenge and chill atmosphere. Recommended.

At 7.9 hours I just hit 10% complete. This is a big operation. I was never great at Minesweeper and had to relearn it. This also isn't *that* much like Minesweeper, even though the math is the same; because there's no danger, and you're almost always working with both large and small numbers. Small white numbers and large blue numbers are essentially the same problem in reverse: Sometimes you're glad to see an 8 because you only need to rule out one square, and so on. The music is the pleasant, mildly eerie downtempo stuff in the trailer. I'm not sure how much of it there is, but I can tell it's repeating pretty often though not often enough to annoy me. At some point I may shut it off and play the Kind Words soundtrack instead, just for variety's sake. As you clear the board of easy solutions, discover all the little 0 and 9 islands, the 1s 2s and 3s situated along the borders, and start to build little knots of solvedness along usually the border intersections, it becomes a sort of adventure trying to join them to each other, and the board starts to feel like a map. Of space, of some fantasy world, of your brain maybe. Or not at all depending on if you can get sucked in, but for me it takes on the feeling of an old strategy game, like Empire Deluxe or Civilization 2. Another thing that makes this very unlike Minesweeper is that you learn Minesweeper chiefly through jump scares followed by grudging sessions of book learning. When you screw up in this game, the numbers just turn red. In theory you could refuse to learn it at all and just brute force your way through it by trial and error. This environment leads to a more tranquil and less frustrating examination of each type of problem, and organic discovery of the various solving techniques. It's a lot more satisfying than just bang, you're still stupid, go look it up. There are some GUI annoyances I might as well mention. I can't get used to scrolling with middle click. Every once in a while my MMO brain sneaks out and in one gesture I drag a massive gash of wrongness across my beautiful work. The button that clears errors is inelegant and a little punitive, so when you do make a mess you'll some lose correct progress around the margins. I don't mind this but it can be jarring at first. This is easily my favorite puzzle game since Hexcells, and before that Square Logic unless you count Bejeweled 3. It's really solid, it's simple and hard at the same time, you're totally free to solve it how you like. I feel like somewhere adjacent to this game is a dangerously addictive undiscovered genre for which special legislation will be required to protect people like me.