Do you feel stupid? No? Would you like to feel stupid? Zengrams is here to help. This minimalist geometric puzzler from Andreas Boye and publisher GameBlyr is releasing on iOS today with the sole intent of crippling your brain with its origami inspired puzzles. The object of the game is simple: take a set of shapes, and merge/slice them until they fit into a pre-defined area. What starts out easy picks up fast, and before you know it, you’ll find yourself asking “why didn’t I see that sooner?” as you play through the game’s 70 levels.
Zengrams begins with minimal fanfare. You’re presented with a square, and an arrow on screen which prompts you to drag that square into an outlined box. An easy first puzzle, but don’t go getting too cocky now. Merging two shapes together will also merge their color. Partially combining two shapes will slice the shape into pieces along the parts where the color change is located. This means you can effectively create entirely different shapes by merging yours together, with the end goal simply being to make sure that they all fit perfectly within the outline presented on the screen.
Zengrams is not kidding around when it comes to difficulty. On its own storefront page it describes itself to be “the most challenging puzzle game on iOS” and before even making the sale goes on to console you with “Do not be alarmed if you cannot complete all 70 mindbending puzzles – most players cannot.”. I’ll go ahead and chime in to back up the game’s claims. The game is very challenging and it was not rare to find myself stuck on puzzles for 30-40 minutes without progress.
Sometimes the simplest looking puzzles wind up being the most complex.
The game’s minimalism does mean it avoids a lot of the irritating trappings inherent to mobile games. You won’t find yourself being bullied into paying for more levels or hints/cheats to get through your existing ones. What you have is what you get, and that’s that. Unfortunately that minimalism also extends to options. You can toggle music on and off, change the game’s colors to a more “colorblind friendly” scheme and that’s about it. Here’s a weird complaint I had, the game doesn’t change orientation depending on how you hold the iPad.
If you think I just did a poor job of explaining how the game works, then fair enough. When it comes down to it, Zengrams’ puzzles are rather difficult to explain, and really that’s my one big issue with the game as a whole, there’s very little by way of instructions, instead Zengrams settles for drawing some symbols on the first few levels to guide players and hope they get the idea from there. For the most part I got the hang of things, but there’s definitely a period within the first ten levels or so where you’re more figuring out the mechanics than actually using them to solve the puzzles. If you can get past the learning curve, there’s a lot to like here though.
All in all the game is a fairly bare bones package, but one should also keep in mind its $2.99 price tag. Zengrams is hard enough that its 70 puzzles should keep you busy well past the point where you’re still feeling that price tag. If a challenge is what you seek, you should definitely track this down on the app store.
