Simply Puzzles: Junctions

Playing through Simply Puzzles: Junctions was fun for me. It is a minimalistic numbers puzzle game and as such is very reminiscent of Tametsi and the Hexcells series even though its puzzles are not as unique and rather generic. Yet there has not been another similar game in quite a while that was able to keep my attention all the way through to the end. Junctions puzzles consist of a board with a rectangular grid and some numbers on the grid junctions which tell you how many lines have to touch that number. Each square of the grid has to be filled with a diagonal line so obviously there are only two options to fill any given square. On top of that simple rule the player is not allowed to form any given shape with the lines on the board, i.e. there must not be a closed "loop" of lines. Finally and most importantly, none of the puzzles require any guessing! What intriguied me about the game was exploriong all the different facets of "starting clues". Aside form the obvious clues, e.g. a 0 or a 4 on the board, there are plenty of other deductions that can be made in order to start filling an untouched section of the board and finding those was very satisfying. Yet the amount of deductions to apply is limited and with 100 puzzles to complete some may find the gameplay a bit repetitive. As mentioned before, Junctions does not reach the craftsmanship of such games as Tametsi or Hexcells. There would be some room for improvement. Most important for me would be a feature that lets you highlight a specific continuous line on the board, especially in the later puzzles of the game. It can be quite challenging to figure those out on your own on a board with about 100 squares that are mostly filled. I know such feature from conceptis puzzles games and it would simply facilitate solving the puzzles as opposed to progressing the puzzle solution. Nonetheless, I find Junctions much better than plenty of other minimalistic number puzzle games out there and as such it deserves my recommendation. It took me a little over 5 hours to complete all puzzles. For a price of 2.39€ that's a good amount of content.