Count Logica

A faithful if flawed adaption of David Millar's classic Haunted Mirror Maze puzzle game. On the plus side, it is a faithful adaption of this nonogram/picross sort of puzzle, with the same vampires, ghosts and zombies as in the original Adobe-Flash game. Still the game could have used a bit more polishing and play-testing: many levels are uneven in difficulty (super-easy levels are sprinkled in with very hard ones) and the music is insipid. It is a faithful rip-off of the original game, but I feel that there was a missed opportunity to explore new features. Millar is often creating variations with one-way mirrors and what-have-you, but he had nothing to do with this... an extremely bare-bones adaption, lacking both originality and innovation. For those unfamiliar with Millar's game: you have a board with numbers on each side of a row. Inside that row there may be / and \ slashes, symbolizing mirrors. A zombie is worth 1 point in front of or behind a mirror, a vampire is worth 1 point only in front of a mirror (and zero behind it) and a ghost is worth 1 point only behind a mirror (and zero in front of it.) Therefore, if you have a slash mirror in your row, and the row is wo…

The graphic of the game might not be great, but it is a really nice puzzle game with 300 levels to solve. I have no idea how to explain the puzzles - some weird mix of nonograms and mirrors, but I think it is a clever idea I haven't heard or seem before (might have been done before for all I know, I didn't research it, I just personally never seen it). The Linux version works without any issues.

Reluctantly I'm gonna have to vote against this one. On the surface level this is somewhat of a mix between Hexcells and nonograms. Each number represents how many entities you can see by following the path from that line to the other end; mirrors may change this trajectory and even loop through the same tile sometimes. Zombies are always seen. Vampires are only seen before hitting any mirrors and don't count otherwise. Ghosts are only seen after at least one mirror. And similarly to minesweeper-like games you get to know how many of each entity type is left to place on the board. It's generally fun but the further you go the more level design falls apart (for me at least). There are 100 levels for each of the 4x4, 5x5, and 6x6 categories and it is obvious that they've all been randomly generated and thrown together. Some levels take literally four seconds to solve while others can get me stuck for a full hour. It just feels like the levels were not curated by a human designer after being procedurally generated. It's fun to find not so obvious moves but sometimes you have to make an assumption like "okay, suppose this tile is a vampire, what happens next?", and then solve a LOT …

Count Logica is a mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as a cash grab. It's a nonogram puzzle game not unlike Sudoku or Minesweeper where you're presented with numerical hints and must arrange the various squares to meet the quota presented on the right of the screen. The rules are pointlessly convoluted here, for a game intended to appeal to mobile/browser gamers and Minesweeper fans. This was slapped together with the godawful Godot Engine, which is a very limited game engine only suitable for 2D pixel crap and this kind of mobile app, arguably indistinguishable from something made with Adobe Flash. Typical of any mobile app, resolution is locked and the port to PC was lazily done, with no widescreen support, and of course the dumbed down mobile app visuals will appeal to no serious PC gamers. This is about as interesting as the puzzles in the back of the newspaper. Competing with the puzzle section in the newspaper is a curious business plan, but here we see it in full swing. If you really want to play this kind of puzzle, they're free on the web, so there's no justification in paying the $2 USD cash grab price for this.

Thumbs up! There are some flaws, but this is worth taking a look at if you like puzzles. The type of puzzles in this game are known as Haunted Mirror Mazes. It’s not the same as Sudoku, but there are some similarities. Both involve filling in a grid while satisfying a set of logical rules. In a Haunted Mirror Maze, you must place the monsters so that you see the correct total. Ghosts can only be seen after mirrors, vampires can only be seen before mirrors, and zombies can always be seen. This game has three hundred levels, one hundred each of the three grid sizes: 4x4, 5x5 and 6x6. One flaw in the game is that the level difficulty varies widely. Level 94 might be much tougher than levels 93 and 95. Fortunately, you don’t need to solve them in order. You can skip a level and come back to it later. You always get five unlocked levels for each grid size, so you could theoretically skip four levels and keep going until you reached level 100. I like this mechanic better than having to solve each level in order one by one. I didn’t like the music, but I liked that the game counts the monsters for you, so you know how many of each you have left. The monster count is an important clue…

Creative and fun puzzle game. Simple but well built and entertaining. Similar to Sudoku but implements conditional logic rather than math.