Liquidum Reviews

Solid logic puzzle game that would work as a paper-and-pen puzzlebook just as well. It starts out as Picross/Nonogram, but layers in additional novel mechanics as the game progresses. Fairly short, but priced accordingly, and Steam Workshop support adds long-term appeal, as well as randomly generated daily and weekly puzzles. I got a solid 30+ hours of puzzling fun out of this.

Excellent for folks who enjoy nonograms / picross. The variety of puzzles is really enjoyable. I recommend skimming the options menu to tune the hint behavior to your liking as well as increasing the size of the numbers/borders.

Liquidum is an excellent picross/nonogram puzzel game with a twist: flowing water in aquariums that are made up of connected cells. As the water flows down this allows for new strategies and logical deductions without ever having to guess to find the solution to a puzzle. In addition to the puzzles included it also comes with daily levels, a weekly marathon and multiple puzzle generators using different rulesets and difficulties. I would highly recommend it if you enjoy logic puzzle games. Liquidum also runs on the Steam Deck, but the hints can be a bit too small, so I would recommend playing on a desktop instead.

Sudoku-descended puzzler. Has good gameplay, as well as proper level select and more than one level to work on at a time. Runs great on Linux.

An addictive pure-logic game. Long after exhausting the puzzle levels, I'm still playing the daily puzzles, the weekly marathon, and generating endless puzzles to zone out on. There are multiple puzzle generators, using different rulesets and difficulties. If you like this kind of logic puzzle at all, you'll get a lot of value out of Liquidum.

Really nice picross game with aquarium puzzles and other interesting mechanics. Besides the campaign levels, there are procedurally generated levels in Explorer mode. And you can also create your own levels or download other people's creations. The presentation is nice, too. You can toggle off the timer, auto-correct (recommended) and some other features.

I've never been a puzzle gamer, since I usually have a lot of difficulty to learn the mechanics, how things work, how I am supposed to solve the puzzle, then I get frustrated and move on to another game. But in Liquidum something that really caught my attention is how smooth the learning curve is. The game doesn't start with anything too complex, you see the water, you fill the squares and that's it. After some stages you start getting introduced to new mechanics, but one at a time. There is a lot of room between mastering a mechanic and getting to know a new one, and how you increasingly start applying what you've learned is what made this game different for me than other puzzles. The process of planing how you solve the puzzle in your head, plus using the markers on the stage, is something as gratifying as clearing a tough boss in a Souls game! And I believe I only got the encouragement to keep learning, thinking and trying to solve these puzzles thanks to the chill atmosphere and smooth planning of the stages progression. Thanks for getting me into puzzles, and if you haven't tried or doesn't like puzzle games you should give Liquidum a try.

Encountered a very strange bug. When I first opened the game, the game window was very large, extending beyond the screen edges. But that's not a big deal: I can manually drag and resize the window to the desired size. The problem arises later. After playing a few levels and closing the game, reopening it results in the game window not displaying. I can see a thumbnail in the taskbar but cannot bring it to the foreground. I don't know how to fix this. I downloaded the Android version, but whenever I open the daily challenge, a dialog box appears saying "generating," and then the app crashes. 2024.5.15 Update I have resolved the issue—after the game starts, it scales down to a very small window in the top left corner of the desktop. You can manually resize it to an appropriate size. However, this can still be considered a bug. Additionally, the game's GPU usage is extremely high, my graphics card fan is spinning like crazy, as if it's running a AAA game, which is quite unusual for such a pure puzzle game.

Liquidum is a really thought provoking puzzle game with a lot of content. Definitely worth puzzle fans playing this one!

[b]9/10[/b] Nonograms, but with water and gravity. [b]What is it:[/b] A logic game similar to nonogram/picross, or rather [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/416770/SquareCells/]SquareCells[/url], but with flowing water instead of fixed blocks. On a square grid, you're given clues for rows and columns about how much water is supposed to be in the row/column, and you have to fill in the water so that it satisfies all the row and column requirements. The trick is that the grid is separated into different pools, and water in a pool flows down, so you can't put up water on top of air, if a cell must have water, then all the cells below or at the same level in that pool must also have water. Unlike nonograms, where you have the exact size of each consecutive painted sequence of cells, you're only given the total number of water cells, if at all. Sometimes you're given an additional information, if the water forms a single consecutive block, or must be split, or even just this compactness information without the actual number of water cells, i.e. "{?}" means that you don't know how much water is in the row, but you know there is at least one cell, and all the water cells are together. It gets more complicated later on when cells can be split in half, so a clue like 2.5 could mean either two whole cells and a half, or any other combination up to 5 different halves. One other type of clue that is helpful, but is only given in some puzzles, is the quantity of water that still needs to be placed, and like in minesweeper, it can be crucial in figuring out the solution. Oh, and I almost forgot, sometimes you're told how many pools with a certain amount of water in them must exist, e.g. "there must be 0 pools with 1 unit of water, and 2 with 3.5 units of water". Another mechanic introduced later on is boats, which must always be on top of water, and always in a whole cell. You may get separate clues for the boats just like for water, how many are in a row/cell, if they are connected or not, and how many still need to be placed in. With these mechanics, the game comes up with really clever puzzles, from straightforward "here are all the row/column clues", through "there are no number clues, just connectedness clues", to bare bones "there are no clues other than you need to place 5 boats and 12.5 water". There are too few campaign levels, but they are good. Other than the main puzzles, the game also comes with a daily puzzle, a set of 10 weekly challenges, and infinite random puzzles of different sizes and difficulty, steam workshop integration, leaderboards for the daily/weekly puzzles, and DLCs. [strike]So, the contents of the game is good, but I feel that the implementation is lacking. Maybe it's just me, but the game is unattractive, and it could seriously benefit from the touch of a UI/UX designer. The UI is unfocused, the color scheme is unpleasant, the UI elements seem randomly picked from different places with different styles that don't fit together, and the spacing around them is weird, the text looks bad, too many animations and useless delays that slow me down. I am an impatient person, and I think all games should have an "impatient" setting. And while I really believe that for a logic puzzle game the look is the least important part, in this case I think that trying to make the game more "pretty" had the exact opposite effect, it made the game too distracting to be enjoyed. But all this can be fixed, and doesn't really warrant a "not recommended" status. Here are a few suggestions: Add different color themes in the settings, including simple black on white and white on black. Design, or find a common set of icons (Material Icons has Water, Sailing, Clear, Check, HourglassEmpty, RestartAlt, Menu, and maybe others). Unify fonts and their sizes, choose a better font, reduce the stroke width, use one font color. Align and size things better. Add a setting to disable/reduce animations. Add an option to go straight to the next puzzle instead of taking me back to the level select, or worse, taking me back to the chapter select (the random puzzle ending does this well).[/strike] The game has been updated a lot after the initial release. Most of my feedback has been taken into account, and although the UI could still use some polishing, overall the game is well done, with plenty of customization to suit anyone's playstyle, good QoL features, and looks good enough. [b]How hard is it:[/b] Easy to slightly hard if you want to perfect every level. The game is forgiving, mistakes are simply counted, but don't prevent you from completing the puzzle, so if you want to, you can just randomly click until the puzzle is finished. The random puzzles can be quite hard. [b]How long is it:[/b] 48 main levels split in 6 chapters, which can be finished in a couple of hours. Multiple levels in a chapter are unlocked, and only 6/8 need to be finished to unlock the next chapter. Several extra islands with 10 levels plus a custom infinite level generator with a certain style are also included or available as DLCs. Plus, one daily level, ten weekly levels, and an infinite puzzle generator can keep you occupied forever. All these would normally unlock gradually, but there's an option to unlock everything at once. [b]Level design:[/b] Very good. Varied levels, with non-trivial solutions, but too few main levels. The random puzzles seem to be good as well, I encountered no bad puzzles so far. One complaint I have is that the "challenge" puzzles in a chapter are usually not much harder than the rest, quite often I would spend more time on one or two of the "normal" ones than on the challenge levels. [b]Quality:[/b] Good content, good features, decent look. Good levels, good mechanics, decent achievements, cloud saving, different profiles, plenty of settings (including dark mode and blue light filter, disable timer, allow mistakes, clue optimizations). Mouse-only play, but good (though not rebindable) keyboards shortcuts for different tools. Pencil mode for working out difficult levels. [b]Worth the price:[/b] Yes, if you plan on using the random and daily levels for a long time. [b]Most positive aspect for me:[/b] Good mechanics. [b]Most negative aspect for me:[/b] Unpolished UI. [b]What would make it better:[/b] [strike]Polish the UI[/strike]. Keyboard and controller support. [strike]Add a "pencil" mode, which would be really useful on harder levels[/strike]. [strike]"Impatient" setting for skipping animations[/strike]. [strike]Add a Skip Level option[/strike] (there's an unlock everything option which makes this not really needed). [strike]Unlock daily levels and random difficulties from the start[/strike]. Add a few more main puzzles. Use a different icon for "no water", I frequently forget that a big red X could still allow a boat in there. [b]Also consider:[/b] [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/416770/SquareCells/?curator_clanid=25928931]SquareCells[/url] and the rest of [url=https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/3331/Logic_Puzzle_Pack/]the Logic Puzzle Pack[/url] for more logic games somewhat similar to this. [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/2310810/Tents_and_Trees/?curator_clanid=25928931]Tents and Trees[/url], good logic game about placing tents next to trees. [i]100² Logic Games[/i] for iOS/Android has a similar game called Pouring Water. [quote]For more puzzle game reviews, news and everything puzzle-related, follow [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/25928931-Puzzle-Lovers/]Puzzle Lovers[/url] and check out our [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/puzzlelovers]Steam group[/url].[/quote]