1st Impressions

Cubit is a great little game that just hit the App Store in August.  It is a wonderfully executed puzzle game.  As you can see in the screen shot, the top of the screen has three views that show you where your block(s) reside from three different perspectives.  The goal is to move it/them so that the numbers on your “key” at the top correspond with the number of sides that are touching.  The numbers turn yellow as you achieve that goal.  As you move your finger around on the bottom of the screen, your field of play rotates around so that you can view it from any angle.  By touching a block, you can move if forward/backward, left/right, and/or up/down.  It sounds a lot more complicated than it really is.  It is actually very intuitive and the means of play in no way gets in the way of the game.

In many ways, this game reminds me of the old Nonogram style games.  In this case though, it has been elevated to 3D.  It is this increasing level of complexity with a small playing field that is perfect for the iPhone.  Larger puzzles with massive grids would be too difficult to casually play.  I would, however, love to possibly see 4×4 grids added in the future.

Some real thought went into this game.  There is no timer or anything to cause you stress.  As you finish a level, you can post the fact that you completed it on Twitter.  The first few levels are nothing really to brag about though.  If this feature were disabled until you got into more advanced levels, that would be fine with me.  Other thoughtful things are that you can leave the game at any time.  When you come back, it not only remembers what level you were on, but the position of your blocks as you left them.  If you get stuck, you can skip to the next level (as long as you stay in the same difficulty level of 20 puzzles) and return to the current one at another time.  As you get close to completing the puzzle, it will even tell you how many moves it will take to finish it.  While sometimes this appeared helpful, when you are really stuck, it is a taunt at how close you are.   One undocumented feature is that you can turn off the sound in the game and listen to your iPod library of music while playing the game.

My suggestions are few.  I’d love for there to be some hint system for the more difficult puzzles.  When you are getting up to 5 different blocks to move around, it would be nice of you could replace the actual view of things as displayed on the top with the front, side, and top view of what the solution looks like.  In other words, you would see the solution represented graphically instead of numerically.  Having both modes of play would really help, I would think.  The only other suggestion I would have is to add additional levels that are generated on demand and/or levels with an increased playing field size.  While I think the higher levels of the game are probably smarter than I am and I’m likely to never get finished with them all, I could see the benefit of having more puzzles available in the cheaper difficulty levels.

The game currently consists of 100 different levels that get increasingly more difficult.  If the $2.99 price tag is too much for you, a free lite version is available that contains the first 15 levels.  And, if you can wait until September 5th, the app will be on sale for $0.99.  At that price, it definitely makes my Must-Have list for any puzzle fan and deserves the 5-star rating in the App Store.  While I don’t give out stars here, this game made it to my single partially-full iPhone screen of favorites.  So, out of the hundreds (300-400) apps and games I’ve tested and/or reviewed, this makes it to my list of top 10-15 games.  So my suggestion is simple.  Download the Lite version to play with for the next 72-hours, then grab this thing while it is on sale.  You won’t regret it.

UPDATE: Seems that once you get past the novice and beginner difficulty levels (40 puzzles), you do get into 4×4 grids.  This means that you have 64 possible positions for blocks instead of 9.  My genius son played some of these higher levels (as well as everything before them), but found it more difficult to maneuver the blocks where you wanted them.  It became frustrating.  It also revealed the need for keeping track of user progress for more than one user.  If I am any indication, the game gets too difficult at some level that probably differs from one person to the next.  That is why I would love to see it generate new levels within a certain selected difficulty level.