Prismatica

Nice and challenging puzzles. Needs a dark mode though, the bright colors make my eyes hurt after half an hour session.

dropped it almost immediately, terrible experience. I hate rotary puzzles with a passion and honestly have no idea why I bought this many years ago, but the bigger and less personal problem is it works exactly like a lazy mobile port but it was made for pc and only ported to phones later. good old lazy unity launcher for resolutions and windowed mode, in-game settings are separate audio toggles (no volumes) and a color blind toggle, the end. annoying ui sounds, music isn't to my taste but that's again more of a me problem. no tooltips, just icons, a big-ass cursor and very little text. each level was eventually made available in zen mode without time and move limits, on top of challenge mode with both, that's something. and while unnecessary 'this is the level' and shuffle animations can be sped up, they can't be turned off entirely. a huge waste of time and they happen after a simple level reset as well. progress stored in the registry is just the cherry on top. further improvements (and fluff like achievements and cards) were promised 10 years ago, a year after the game came out, so it's safe to say they'll never happen.

Although it is a good game, the developers have done a nasty thing of putting the level label directly over the center of each puzzle blocking important colors. It's a serious pain and very short sighted of them. The label should not be RIGHT ON TOP of the puzzle itself but to the side. I hope they fix this.

Prismatica is a color theory puzzle game where colors are scrambled and you have to rotate the gears to move the colored tiles around until they are in their appropriate places. This includes their combinations as well (example: If a red and a yellow gear have shared tiles, those tiles will turn orange). There are four total sections, each with a standard and challenge category of 12 puzzles (so there are a total of 48 puzzles that are the same in both standard mode and challenge mode). Standard mode gives you your first of three stars for that level, and challenge mode asks you to finish the same puzzle under a certain number of moves and under a certain amount of time to get the other two stars. I finished the game with all puzzles at three stars in about 11 hours. I definitely enjoyed my time with this game. I think it's great that there is a standard and challenge mode. A nice feature they included is that you don't have to finish both of the challenges at once to get the other two stars. You can focus on one at a time if you would prefer, because once you complete a task it gives you the star. This is much more preferable to having to be conscious of the moves you are making…

You know those tile swap puzzles in HoG's? That's what this is, but the whole game. Was clearly designed with touch devices in mind as it controls poorly with the mouse. Starts out okay, but fairly quickly the challenge is replaced with tediousness and time consumption.

Clean visuals, relaxing music, simple and elegant play mechanic, and gradual escalation of difficulty. It's a bit like solving a Rubik's Cube: rotate groups to shuffle the tiles around to where you need them to be. The first few puzzles are easy to get you used to the actions, but it doesn't stay easy for long. :)