I have a love/hate relationship with puzzle games. (I’d rather engage with something that allows me to play expressively.) But I love strategy games and a few puzzle games.
Subway gameplay involves moving pieces around to open a path to the goal. Each level (01-91) gets increasingly difficult.
The part I find fascinating is my approach to solving the puzzles. There’s an interesting mental shift, where I “let go” of trying to solve the puzzle overall, focus on which moves I *can* currently make, take into account what has to happen (in the final move) to solve the puzzle, and *try to solve faster*. I find that I’m far more successful when I make this series of mental shifts than when I try to approach the puzzle as a whole, or in a systemic way. Hard to articulate.
Subway also has a super clean art style and implementation that I love.
This game has made it onto my list of iPhone favorites, along with Galcon and Drop7.
I get what you’re saying. Do you think you get better at general puzzle solving by concentrating on one move at a time, at-the-moment thinking, the micro… and slowly the macro strategy emerges? or do you think it’s a better cognitive strategy to focus on macro solutions first? how would this apply to other games?
This happened to me while playing Columns… i only tried to survive moment to moment and all of a sudden i cant die. I had to turn the game off due to boredom. off topic, remember Solomon’s Key?
I think the fun part is looking at the puzzle, noting the end requirement, then trying to go into subconscious fast mode…kind of a Blink thing, maybe.