Tenrow Reviews

Simplicity, with a twist of difficult. Did I mention the dash of clever? Well, more than a dash. This game was a relaxing break from so much... life? Too bad it ended so quickly. I highly recomend it. It was an afternoon of quiet joy in the simple visual problems, that still managed to be difficult. 10/10 a wonderful game. 5/5 stars 11/10 chicken nuggets (The only one that really counts)

[h1]Review # 47[/h1] [b]TL;DR[/b] 6.5 possible solutions out of 10 [b]Pros[/b] [list] [*] interesting puzzle concept [*] Simple controls [*] Decent music loop [/list] [b]Cons[/b] [list] [*] Not many levels [*] Felt tedious after a bit [/list] [b]Gameplay[/b] This is little to say about the puzzle genre as far as the gameplay section goes at least for games like these. It creates a simple loop and understanding of the puzzle and consistently executes the same loop with the numbers being the only things that changed. I finished the majority of the puzzles fairly quickly with only a few giving me a difficult time. Something that I did find interesting is the quick patterns that the player tend to realize that makes the game substantially easier. [b]Graphics[/b] Astetically this is a fairly pleasing game. All of the assets seem rather crisp and even are made even better by the simplicity of the audio loop. That being said, that are not too many points that can be made for or against this game in this particular department. [b]Impressions of the game[/b] Puzzle games like this are made or destroyed on their premise. Due to the lack of variety it is a hard to recommend this game to people that are not aware of what exactly the are getting into. At a really cheap price I think that it is a fun game with fairly simple achievements.

Disappointing game that may be logical, but still requires guesswork in order to complete the puzzles. Not to mention that it can be 100% completed (50 puzzles) in 50 minutes. The easiest way to complete this is to guess and activate most of the grid and then remove some until you reach the solution since there are no penalties for activating the wrong squares.

An attractive minimalist puzzler. A thinker rather than a twitcher (no timers, enemies, etc.) A likely hit with Hexcells fans. Runs great on Linux and embraces Unity3D's multi-monitor support. ETA: After a few years playing other games of similar design, I've come to the conclusion that Tenrow just isn't that great a puzzle game and flipped my review. Too many puzzles with multiple solutions, too much trial-and-error, leave it unsatifying and frustrating and mean that it just can't hold its own against the greats like Hexcells, Tametsi, and Delete. Go play those instead.

I've been playing a number of casual puzzle games or, as I'd prefer, airport games, lately. And I'm pretty impressed with this one for mostly intangible reasons, but I'll do my best to explain why I think you should buy it. Tenrow is a mobile tablet game that isn't available on any app store and can only be played with a PC. You are given a puzzle consisting of rows and columns of boxes. Some boxes have numbers and some do not. You can click the boxes to effectively turn them on and off. When activated, the numbered boxes that share a row or column with the one you activated will decrease by one. The goal is to find the right combination of active and inactive boxes to cause all of the numbers to reach zero, and then the puzzle is completed. The reason that I call these types of games "airport games" is because they're the variety that you would pick up in a $5-10 puzzle book at the airport while you are waiting on a flight and otherwise have nothing to do. They're not the most exiting or brilliant things you've ever tried, but they're fun enough and get the job of passing the time done. Tenrow is one of those games that I would easily give a pass to for being interesting and challenging enough to keep my interest going and get through it. It also happens to be relatively easy to get a perfect game, simply by completing the puzzles. Although my father's verdict for this game is "It's like doing your taxes", for $3 time-killer, my verdict is a strong rapid nod with squinted quizzical eyes.

Complex Simplicity I don´t really know how to rate this game. It´s a simplistic puzzler to the likes of Square Logic or Hexcells with a clever twist of the mechanics from minesweeper. Its graphics and gameplay are simplistic yet work in their design. Having only one button tells you right from the start, that you will spend most of your time thinking rather than acting. And with that come the problems i have with this game. It´s too complex. It´s impossible to think through the mechanics in your head so it comes down to placing some blocks to make the numbers update, see your solution didn´t work and then start over, which for me has nothing to do with a puzzle game. That said tho, once you had to go through the chore of such a level, there will be multiple ones where the numbers are well placed, let you eliminate some options and think through every solution before being ready to put it into the gametiles. This alternating between very well designed level and elimination games made me unsure on weather i liked the game or not. All in all, it´s great for a little pause (as it´ll be over after that) and the well designed level were in far greater number than the rest. If you want a casual puzzler for a few minutes then go ahead and get it...

I was hoping this would be similar to Squarecells/Hexcells, and it starts off looking like it could be. Unfortunately, the difficulty never really ramps up from the intro how-to-play example level and it only introduces one extra mechanic fairly early on that actually makes the puzzles easier, rather than more challenging. The music is quite nice and I have said really positive things about colour palette options in the past (Lyne, for example), but although palettes unlocked at certain levels, the game doesn't tell you when new colours are available. And for some buggy reason, you can't actually return to the main menu from the options, so you have to quit and re-open the game to change anything. Overall, the concept is cute but it completely lacks challenge - I finished the game in less than an hour and you can 100% the achievements within about 30 minutes, which makes 0% sense to me. This game could be much improved by the addition of new aspects to add challenge but honestly, it'll never be in the same league as Hexcells. EDIT to add: lol, just realised that I haven't even played long enough to get all of the card drops. 1/3

[b]Tl;dr:[/b] I decided to not continue playing the game after completing around 30 levels. The game fell greatly below my expectations. None of the levels I have completed gave me satisfaction but on the contrary, I left the levels with frustration. [b]I would expect levels to require a great level of logic to solve, and not to favor random clicking.[/b] The game starts easily enough. You learn the main mechanic, and then a new one is added after around level ten. You play with that [b]new mechanic[/b] for a few more levels, then it [b]magically disappears[/b] and it starts not appearing in the upcoming levels. [b]I expected an introduced mechanic to stay in the game, and not underutilized for a long time.[/b] Except for this, [b]the levels leak a "starting" point[/b] that should be investigated and found. I don't know how the levels in Tenrow were created, but they felt random rather than hand-crafted. [b]I was expecting to see at least an opening move in each level[/b] followed by a nice logical section that requires considering a couple of lines together before making a move. [b]This was not the case[/b] at least for most of the levels until I stopped at around level 30. Finally, I was really disappointed that the numbers on the boxes were updating each time I clicked a box regarding their row or column. This makes the game easier, which is not a problem, but [b]it also favors randomly clicking to solve the "problems" the player encounters in the levels.[/b] Letting the player disable this behavior I think would be a nice addition to the game. To sum up, I would enjoy playing the game until the end if I thought that the levels were thought on and well-crafted by hand, but that doesn't seem like the case in my experience, and [b]I can't recommend the game[/b] due to that.

Nice puzzle game. Tenrow is a mildly challenging puzzle game - like mine sweeper, except the numbers encompass the whole row/column. As far as I can tell, there isn't much of a difficulty curve, so in the unlikely event that you find these puzzles too easy, you'll be disappointed. Some tiny niggles: unlike minesweeper, the numbers adjust with each "mine" you place, and you can't mark squares as "cleared" either. Overall, the interface is fine and does its job well. It took me 66 minutes to beat all 50 levels. Recommended to everyone who enjoys mine sweeper and wants something slightly more difficult - unfortunately, there isn't all that much of it. [i]This game runs well on my old Windows XP machine.[/i]

There simply isn't enough to the game. Length: It took me less than an hour to clear all 50 levels. Gameplay: The only new feature introduced after level 1 is gray tiles with which the player cannot interact, but this happens mere minutes into the game (level 8). Also, since there is no penalty for mistakes or reward for accuracy (e.g. new puzzles are only unlocked when previous stages are cleared perfectly), there is no reason to not resort to trial and error when the logic needed to solve a puzzle becomes more complicated. Puzzle Quality: Several puzzles had (and some may still have) multiple solutions, which was not the developer's intention. I'm sure that designing good logic puzzles with only one solution is no easy matter, but it's not very difficult to find these alternative solutions, so I'd say that this game needed a bit more attention before release. Additionally, with the exception of the occasional larger puzzle, the game doesn't seem to become much harder as the player progresses. With neither difficulty scaling nor new gameplay elements, Tenrow simply isn't engaging. The developer is already talking about a sequel with another 40-50 levels and an algorithm for autogeneration. Such an algorithm might justify its own game, but the 40-50 handcrafted levels would be better added to this one instead. If every $3 puzzle game like this were of similar quality and length, I might have had a different opinion because my expectations would have been different. But I just can't recommend this game when Squarecells and the Hexcells trilogy do a much better job in every respect for the same price.