![]() ![]() Puzzle Dimension staggers the difficulty of the stages within each puzzle cluster. Some of the trickier puzzles will require the player to make a plane-based leap of faith to gain access to parts of the levels. ![]() ![]() Look to whatever tile is immediately beneath you, and you’ve found down. Should you find yourself rolling up a steep incline, your instincts would tell you that rolling off to one side would bring you back to where the incline began. Is that a sunflower I see growing under the course? The gravity system is one of the most daunting elements in Puzzle Dimension. Switch tiles will reveal invisible tiles, and hide others. These will allow you to roll over them once, but will activate a death trap (such as fire pits, or crumbling tiles) that will destroy your sphere should you try to pass a second time. Hit a springboard tile and you’ll be propelled over the adjacent two tiles. Roll onto an ice tile, and you’ll continue to roll until you reach a non-ice tile (often depositing you over the side of the puzzle). What isn’t simple: Puzzle Paradise packs a wealth of booster and trap tiles. Worse yet, you’ll have to start the course again. Fall off the course by rolling or leaping to an empty space, and you’ll fall to your doom. By hitting the space or controller button, you can leap over a tile. Use the arrow keys or game controller to move the ball in a direction one square at a time. You must roll over all of the sunflowers in a stage to open the exit gate. The controls are simple: You guide a sphere of unknown arcane origins through various courses, one tile at a time. They don’t change the gameplay, but do provide a visual change of pace.įor puzzle fans, both casual and serious, that are looking for a mind-bending, physics-based experience, Puzzle Dimension fits the bill.Easy to pick up, but difficult to master, Puzzle Dimension turns physics upside down, and challenges you to do the same with your thinking. For additional variety, there are four “themes” that are simply color and texture swaps. Even without a compatible television, the depth effects are extremely well done and it’s easy to imagine how it would look behind 3D glasses. Puzzle Dimension also functions in 3D for those with the hardware to support it. The chiptune soundtrack with its contemporary beat mirrors the transition from pixilated graphics to a more modern art style. The music and sound effects are a perfect fit for the visuals. This led me to more than a few accidental deaths, as it was jarring for me that the movement style didn’t match the avatar. Your ball also doesn’t roll per se, as it stops on each non-iced tile. Unfortunately, despite your avatar being spherical, you are limited to the four primary directions for movement. You can jump gaps and, for some of the puzzles, you’ll be hopping over one-hit tiles to make sure you leave yourself a path back. At times, you’ll need to strategically fall, but more often, you’ll need to figure out the path that bends the laws of physics to your needs. ![]() While there is no time limit, you’ll score more points for finishing the level quickly.Īs you move your ball around the level, gravity will rotate with you, provided that you don’t leave the track. As you traverse the different stages, you’ll transform the landscape from a pixilated wonderland, reminiscent of 3D Dot Game Heroes, to a more realistic visage. The purpose of the game is to collect all of the flowers in each level and reach the gate unharmed. They are, functionally, no different than the crumbling tiles. For instance, while the fire tiles remain on the board, you can still only pass over them once. Some of the new traps are redundant, though. Each cluster introduces one or two more puzzle mechanics starting with crumbling tiles that only allow to pass by once and ramping up quickly to include slippery ice tiles, spike tiles and more. In Puzzle Dimension, you control a ball through 10 clusters of 10 puzzles each. Puzzle Dimension is one of those titles hovering in the middle of the spectrum with a simple enough premise to be accessible, but with challenging and thought-provoking gameplay for the lifelong puzzle connoisseur. Puzzle games are one genre that has lasted through the ages and offers something for everyone whether you’re a casual Bejeweled addict, a hard-core Professor Layton lover or fall somewhere in between. ![]()
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