Tametsi Reviews

Excellent innovations off of Minesweeper

hand-crafted minesweeper puzzles that always have a nice twist and are very good on the go.

It's Minesweeper, and while fairly difficult, there is no required guesswork. You get what you pay for, at well over a 1:10 hour ratio. The only potentially-negative aspect is that the game punishes you for mistakes, by flagging the entire level, which is fine until you realize this can be bypassed by screenshotting the current state of the board. If you want 100% and aren't interested in redoing the puzzle, it may become tedious if you trip mines often.

A richly varied, extensive collection of hand-crafted Minesweeper variant puzzles.

As others have already pointed out: one of the best if not the best minesweeper type of game around. The design of the puzzles is superb.

A purely logic based (and just more fun) version of Minesweeper that doesn't leave you with those annoying 50/50 situations. It also does well at being challenging, but not so challenging that it's not fun to play anymore. You may get stuck for a bit, but if you take your time you will eventually find the solution.

If you like minesweeper-esque puzzles, this is the game for you! It features lots of beautiful logic and is gentle in how it presents it--it introduces you to logic in its basic form in the early levels before making you apply it in a more difficult manner later. Keep in mind, that does not mean the puzzles are easy (in fact, a couple friends have reported that it's too hard for them), but that the puzzle design and progression is very well done. Perhaps my favorite part is how well the clues come together: there was almost no point where I felt unsure of where to look because the puzzles are constructed in such a way that areas of interest stick out, creating a fluid solving experience. And even when you know where to look, the logic on many puzzles keeps you thinking, which is something many other puzzles I've played lack. It makes the puzzles that much more satisfying to solve, since you have to work for your finish. Some things to note are that the UI you choose is all set up during the launch of the game. I know I overlooked this at first. Additionally, the hints in the extra cube levels weren't entirely intuitive to me--they were fair, but confused me a number of times. Aside from that, I have almost no complaints, and would very much recommend this game if you're looking for a good mental exercise!

Autismo prime gameplay, love it, my friends think im not normal anymore

I can't go back to regular Minesweeper after playing this... It's SO GOOD. Awesome to take a puzzle at a time when you need a break etc.

I'm not entirely sure that Tametsi needs yet another glowing review, but I finally 100%ed the game tonight after working on it off and on for the last six years, so I guess it's time... [i]Tametsi is very difficult, scrupulously fair, and [b]the best puzzle game I've ever played.[/b][/i] There'll be more review below, but honestly? The game costs less than $ARBITRARY_BEVERAGE and it's fantastic. Just buy it already. The only critical advice I'll provide is this: in the launcher, before you actually start the game, go to the Settings tab and turn on literally every setting that isn't on by default. Together they dramatically improve the quality-of-life of playing the game, and I can't fathom why they're not on by default on new installs. As for the game itself, it's a tooth-achingly hard take on Hexcells' expanded take on Simon Tatham's no-guessing take on Minesweeper. To unpack that a bit: it's a pure, zero-guessing-required puzzle game where you're finding mines in a grid. Besides the standard numbers in cleared cells you'd expect to find in such a game, it has several refinements. I won't spoil them here, but they're all nicely tutorialized over the first ten puzzles, and they all provide further opportunities for devious design. Fundamentally, once you get past the easier puzzles, the game revolves around finding "the one loose thread." There'll be a place where no mine can go because it causes a deficit somewhere else, or where a mine must go or else the count will be wrong. To mix metaphors, finding that thread sometimes feels like looking for a needle in the world's most overwhelming haystack, but it's always there. The tutorial doesn't lie when it says you never have to guess. Some puzzles collapse neatly once you find one or two critical threads; others are a non-stop assault on your brain, each deduction leading to another one, hidden even more carefully than the last. There are 100 puzzles in the core of the game, but--very mild spoilers that the developer themselves spoiled in their updates--there are quite a few more than that which will unlock as you progress. Every puzzle feels interesting, and just about every one taught me something new about how to look at a Minesweeper-like puzzle. By the end you will be a wizard at this type of puzzle, and it will come naturally through the act of playing the game. Or... you'll decide that it's just too much, as many of my friends have. Which is fine! It's cheap, and you can keep coming back to it as you decide to devote more time discovering its charms. My 101 hours of playtime reflect two separate plays of the game. The first was of the main puzzle set and a few bonus puzzles, and relied heavily on Innocentive's wonderful walkthrough videos, which I'd turn to when I was stuck for more than five minutes or so. That took me probably something like 35 hours. The second started from scratch, and I refused to ever look up anything or ask for help. If I got stuck, I got stuck, and just had to figure out what I was missing. I got through the main 100 puzzles in something like half the time... and then proceeded to spend the bulk of the 65ish-hour playthrough on the bonus puzzles. Some of those took me multiple sessions, where I'd stare at it for thirty minutes, make one or two deductions, and then get stuck. I'd quit the game, come back a day (or week, or month) later, and make a little bit more progress, finding another thread or two to tug loose. I was stuck on one specific puzzle for literally months. I dreaded opening the game to stare at it again. But one day I decided that I was going to solve it, and I sat down and stared hard, and sure enough. There was the thread I had been missing, and another, and another... I'm not ashamed to admit that, on the very last puzzle of the game, I spent something like forty minutes staring hard, 80+% of the way through, until I found the last thread that made it all unravel. It was awful, and then it was awesome, and then I had finished the game on my own terms. Yes, I wish it had music. Yes, I wish it didn't punish you for misclicks in a way that led me to (shamelessly) make use of screenshots and Microsoft Paint. Yes, I wish it would remember my color choices for painting and then save my drawings between sessions. But those are nits. The core of the game is a flawless jewel, hard and unyielding and glittering brightly in the sun. I played this game for six and a half years. What more can one truly ask for?