[u]In short:[/u] Patterna is a challenging hard-logic puzzle game with a steep learning curve. The mechanics are varied and the replayability infinite, but it is very rough around the edges with poor and sometimes frustrating implementation. If you have a low tolerance for bad UI, stay away. If you can stomach that and are a seasoned veteran of logic games, Patterna is well worth buying at full price.
[u]In long:[/u] The developer himself compares Patterna's [b][u]mechanics[/u][/b] to Hexcells, and one can immediately see the inspiration. But Patterna is far from a knock-off, does its own thing and expands gameplay well beyond the scope of Hexcells. Nodes may be revealed or not, may be part of a pattern or not, may carry information about nodes around them up to a distance of 3, may describe the length of the chain they are part of, may have up to 4 colors, may be unlinked, linked or directionally linked, etc. The complexity is smart and truly awe-inspiring, but comes at a cost:
The learning and [b][u]difficulty[/u][/b] curve is very steep and almost nothing about the game seems intutive at first. Minesweeper and Hexcells have a simple elegance that is completely missing in Patterna. Right out of the gate you are inundated with new and abstract terminology ("pattern nodes" vs. "non-pattern nodes") and the tutorial is lacking. From my understanding there used to be a more concise tutorial, but after expanding the game it has been spread out across several level packs. To me it appeared slow, disjointed and partly out of order. To be fair, the game offers pretty much every assistance you can think of: You can mark up to four nodes, which tints all nodes affected by them in different colors and you can switch to a planning mode, where you can temporarily mark nodes. These tools are almost required to use, since especially directional edges tend to produce some counter-intutive results.
The [b][u]levels[/u][/b] are a bit of a mixed bag. There are dozens of pre-made levels (took me about 12h to clear), organized in several sequences, but they mostly left me cold. A good chunk was very easy tutorials, a few were smart and fun and the rest were either focussed on mechanics I didn't enjoy or giganting sprawling mazes of directional edges, which basically required trial and error in planning mode, because there wasn't enough information to solve them step-by-step. But as even the developer has acknowledged on the forums, the pre-made levels were never intended to be the core of the game - the random level generator is! In fact, there are several different ones, which produce different kinds of node graphs. All generators are highly customizable in terms of size, difficulty and mechanics. It is actually incredibly impressive, how much variety and challenge they can produce. My only gripe is, that the difficulty settings are just very rough guides. Even low settings can occasionally produce incredibly complicated relationships requiring several minutes of high level reasoning. But in general the level generators are definitely one of the best I've ever seen and in over 50 hours of playtime with them I've never had the feeling anything repeated or that I had already seen all patterns. There is also a level editor, but Steam Workshop support is partly broken and years after the release there are a grand total of 6 levels published.
Which brings us to the implementation, and here arguably the game starts to fall apart quite a bit.
The [b][u]graphics[/u][/b] are barely passable, albeit completely functional. The Unity loader takes care of resolutions and windowed mode (window can also be drag-resized). I really like the [b][u]sound[/u][/b] effects and the music is decent (although naturally it will get old after 10 hours).
The [b][u]horrible UI[/u][/b] is one of the game's biggest weak points though. It is needlessly complicated and very overwhelming to someone who starts up the game for the first time. The main menu is just an overlay over the gameplay, which leads to strange behaviour, like being able to zoom the main menu background. Functionalities you'll often need are buried as deep in menus as ones you'll never use. Double click doesn't start a level, only the "play" button does. There's a neat graphical statistic at the end of each level that stopped working as soon as I started with randomly generated levels - but it still shows the meaningless data from dozens of hours ago everytime I beat a level. The ingame statistics keeping in general has very little useful data (level times seem to count intro and outro animations, some achievement related metrics are never shown, etc). I disagree with a lot of default choices, but the vast settings menu allows for amazing customization, from marking colors and depths to reversing controls and turning off certain animations. It took some time, but I was able to satisfy a lot of my needs. Some problems remain: If a hint is completely done, the game kicks you out of having it marked (jarring, but helpful), but does not automatically grey it out (why?). Every level starts and ends with a drawn out animation of every single node flying into and out of the screen. While neat at first, I found it to be enormously frustrating being forced to stare at the screen for 15 seconds for the literal 1000th time, when I just want to play the next level.
Speaking of staring at the screen, there are a few pretty bad [b][u]bugs[/u][/b]: Every half hour or so the game just freezes up for 10-20 seconds and becomes completely unresponsive, before continuing as if nothing happened. And after finishing a pre-made sequence you are kicked back to the main menu where a "continue level" button is still active, which reproducibly hardlocks/crashes the game. Together with the deprecated Workshop support, Patterna does not seem well maintained to me.
In [b][u]conclusion[/u][/b] this is a pretty classic example of a first release from a one-man operation. Patterna's developer definitely had a good idea and a firm grasp of mathematics/graph theory, but everything outside his skill-set, like graphics and UI, turned out to be pretty lacking if not awful. Still, the core gameplay is very solid and has infinite replayability. If you are bored by other logic games and you think you've seen it all, Patterna will rack your brain and keep you occupied for dozens of hours and the above-average asking price is very fair for that. Despite all its faults, I've had a lot of fun and don't regret my purchase one bit. If, however, you are new to logic games or if you value a polished experience, I cannot it good conscience recommend Patterna to you.
