CrossCells Reviews

Minimalistic and challenging.

Everything was fine until multiplication comes to play, then everything is getting more challenging. Nice but, It's gonna fry my brain. 1 Puzzle a day is enough exercise I think. If you love math or like challenge, definitely a must grab. If you're looking something similar to Hexcells, then it's probably not for you.

I'd give this a 7/10. It's interesting and some of the puzzles are great, but I prefer the developer's other puzzle games. My big gripe with this one is that, particularly in the last few levels, it really seems like you just have to guess and check and there's no way to logic your way through. The UI isn't really set up for that; there's no saving states and no undo button. The last two levels I was stumped on (42 and 44) it felt like the fastest way to solve them was just by writing a solver in Python which was interesting but not really was I was looking for.

I love Hexcells to death, but CrossCells I find really annoying, and I think I won't finish it. Visually, it's really obnoxious. There's a wavy effect that follows your mouse that makes things hard to read until they stabilize. When you mark a cell as not-wanted, it fades to white, so on some levels it's hard to even remember where they are. Might be a HDR issue, but they become completely invisible when right-clicked. As for the game merits, they're just kind of annoying constrained problems. Beyond level 25, it becomes hard to even keep in your head all of the constraints you're optimizing for. As a result, you're kind of exploring potential solutions, but due to the above visual annoyance, exploring options is annoying. I'm not finding the fun here, sadly.

Unlike the other puzzle games by Matthew Brown, I can't recommend this one. Unlike Hexcells and Squarecells where there was a clear chain of logic you could follow, the logic in this one very often comes down to long chains of "let's see what happens if I mark this space". That isn't much fun to play though. Not really my cup of tea, although I think his other games are brilliant.