ZHED - Puzzle Game Reviews

My brain hurts. So should yours, buy it now!

Fun little game, feels good to complete a puzzle

Fun little brain teaser. Also available on Switch.

Simple yet engaging game, really smooth gameplay and presentation.

ZHED is a quality puzzle game which offers a good challenge. Recommended.

decent puzzles that makes you feel smart when you solve them without resorting to just random trial and error. 4 bucks is a steal for that

Very good puzzle game that has balanced progression and very simple rules.I hate number puzzles and when I saw this one I almost skipped past it and now Im happy that I didn't.This game is not really about numbers its connecting straights lines to get to the finish and I never played something like that.Considering I play tons of puzzlers this was like a breath of fresh air.The puzzles start easy and I managed to get through them without real problem until level 75 and that is where the game starts to throw harder puzzles at you.To be honest I was stuck on one for about 10 hrs :) . All in all a very good and challenging puzzler that is well worth a buy.

Played on Steam Deck. Bold claims in the description of being ""an instant classic puzzle game"" and it actually lives up to that. I haven't seen this puzzle mechanic before but it plays really well and fits perfectly as a minimalist puzzler for my Steam Deck. The back half of the game is pretty hard, primarily the stages with ""red herring"" style elements which were my only issue with this format. The puzzle elements included exclusively to throw the player down the wrong track felt unecessary since the strength of the puzzles already was finding the correct order, so these levels just feel like a waste of time and are frustrating. These elements specifically are blocks positioned to be potential final pieces in a cardinal direction of the finish block, so instead of trying to work out the solution to a single puzzle it is required to work out the solutions to four puzzles to see which one is possible and that is a task that is too much for me personally. Similarly there are stages with multiple finish blocks, but only one is possible... Thankfully there are hints that are accumulated from finishing stages so I could just spam hints to get through those, so overall the game is good especially for the sale price.

I highly recommend ZHED to anyone looking for a fun and challenging puzzle game. With its excellent gameplay, sleek presentation, and engaging puzzles, it's sure to keep you entertained for hours on end.

If you're used to the artsy, one-note small puzzlers genre which pops up on Steam regularly, then you'll probably know exactly what this one is. It has one mechanic, offers a very repetitive, droning electronic music with very little personality. Visuals are basic geometry and flat colours, with a palette swap every so many levels. Clicking makes a noise. Really none of that matters, what matters is the mechanic, and well... ZHED doesn't really stand out in any way, good or bad. The core mechanic is fairly unique but simple: each numbered block on the grid can "paint" X tiles in a straight line, where X is the number written on the block. Tiles which are already painted "extend" that range, so if there are two tiles which are already painted in the direction you want to paint with a numbered block, you will have a range of X + 2 in that direction. The goal is to paint a specific tile on the grid. If you boil it down, it ends up being a "right order" type of puzzle. I found the way of thinking to be reminiscent of traffic jams, where you need to move pieces (usually cars) in straight lines to get out, except instead of other blocks impeding you, here they help you. There are a number of issues with ZHED: - The difficulty curve is awful. You will clear 10 levels in 2 minutes, and then be stomped for 10 on a specific one. Now puzzle games get people stuck in different places as we all have different ways to approach puzzles, but in this case I'm confident in saying that some levels are just straight up harder for no reason. - It's 1280x1024 at most, with black bars in full screen. In 2020. Yes. - There is very little in the way of progression in the game. There are no other mechanics, no sub-logics which appear as you play, and there are not a lot of patterns either. It's really just grids getting bigger. So at the end of the day, is it a good game? ... Yeeees? I think? It's a fun little time waster with not much to offer past its one mechanic. It has 100 levels, which being half-way through I think will keep me busy about 4-6 hours. However, ZHED is not particularly clever or satisfying - only filling. And that's alright.