Piggy Gambit

Once you understand the rules, it's rather simple, but this is still an enjoyable puzzle game that puts focus on chess puzzles. You play the part of a pig with the unusual name of Oink 3. He resolves to discover a new purpose in life after seeing a light from the sky one evening that seemed to do nothing. The path you follow is strictly linear. While there may occasionally be a hidden fork in the path that leads to a secret, you still need to proceed in the direction that the natural flow of game directs you, which requires that you complete puzzles. Unfortunately, parts of the map are not unique and the only indication that you are working on a different set of puzzles are the numbers (1-2, 4-2, etc.). The goal is always the same, even though puzzles combine a few different mechanics. The first half has puzzles where you need to make your way to the collectible piece by using axes to cut down trees, bombs to blow up rocks and planks to create a bridge over the water. The other significant element that takes center stage in the second part of the game are the chess pieces. However, you only need to know the most basic rules of chess, which are even shown on the screen. Most of the time they are just regular objects that may be moved around. As a matter of fact, each new set of puzzles introduces a new mechanic. The only one I didn’t like was thunderstrike that destroys floors and forces you to move quick. Fortunately, it takes place only in a couple of puzzles. The difficulty emerges from the lack of a "undo" button. Every puzzle has a very precise solution, so it's very easy to waste a resource on an object that will cause you to become stuck. When you have multiple pigs under your control at once that share resources, things get much tougher. Making one wrong move so close to the solution happens a lot. Surprisingly, later puzzles do away with this idea and are typically much simpler. Occasional characters you encounter on the map add some flavor to the world and open the path forward. They can be easily ignored because they don’t do anything else other than joke around. There’s also a bus stop that lets you travel between parts of the map. This seems a little pointless because the map is not very big.