Alien Cartographer

Alien Cartographer has some interesting ideas, but I think the execution is a bit more frustrating than it needs to be. When many symbols crowd the playing area, it becomes busywork trying to figure out the one symbol or color that you can 100 % place and the difficulty becomes more about remembering the rules and looking through the playing field over and over than actually thinking about what the solution might be. That is even more true as many levels don't do a good job of "railroading" themselves slowly into a clear solution, but remain very open until the level is almost over, which is a style of puzzling I personally don't enjoy very much, and it also makes it easy to make mistakes. One mistake means you have to restart (if you want to get the achievements, which require you to do every level perfectly). So if you almost solve a big level and then make a mistake, back to the starting line and then you need to set all the symbols again, which involves several clicks per symbol or a click-and-hold which sometimes chooses the wrong symbol. It feels a bit like a hard Sudoku game, where you spend more time looking for that one number than having a satisfying gameplay flow of cra…

Solid little deduction game, difficulty has felt spot on.

Very nice puzzle game. A small number of simple rules, but the interactions between them leave you a lot of detail to work out. I'm halfway through the campaign and happy to keep going.

Good and challenging. Seemingly simple rules combining in complex ways.

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A simpler Tametsi, where difficulties lie in constantly going through the mental checklist of the alien rules, and figuring out which is the next logical move. A few deductions are required, so it's quite a nice puzzle game. Unlike Tametsi though, at no point I have to place note all over the board to find that one contradiction of my assumption, to move forward. Here, it's much more straight forward, either you figure it out, or have to re-read the rules and further simplify them into some key points in a mental checklist. Somewhat CPU intensive for such a simple game.