Saturday Morning Gaming: Cognizer
Cognizer is a game available on Steam that is intended to be played in dinky little 15-45 second chunks. While there are options to “purchase”, the money is a donation. The game is available to download for free if that’s what you’re inclined to just check it out.
Here’s the idea. There is a grid of tiles. Each tile has a color and symbol associated with it.
The rules for any given level are these:
Pick the tiles with good traits.
Avoid the tiles with bad traits.
Do it in the time limit.
And that’s it.
Here, check out an easy, early level:
Okay. Picked at random, the rules are: Yellow Good. Star Bad. Let’s check out the board.
And now we just have to pick all of the yellow squares that don’t have a star in them. Easy peasy.
Next level! Picked at random, ooh, all of the Xes that aren’t red.
Easy peasy, right?
Well, around Level 10, stuff starts getting weird:
Okay. Get all of the blue tiles or the tiles that have circles in them but avoid all of the red tiles and the tiles that have crosses in them.
I hear you ask: “What if it’s a blue tile with a cross? Or a red tile with a circle?” Those tiles are to be avoided. Get the green tiles with circles, get the blue tiles that have Xes, but don’t touch red tiles or tiles with crosses.
The most I’ve seen are 3 items on the rule line. Like, get all of the green and red boxes and three dots, but avoid all of the yellow boxes and crosses and circles. Which turns the game from a more soothing experience to a more stressful one.
(There are additional difficulty levels… Expert, for example, has you play 6-second boards. Which is nuts.)
A simple, elegant game that is perfectly measured out in less-than-a-minute chunks. And, hey, if you like it? You have the option of throwing the developer a couple of bucks.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is one of the Cognizer game screens.)
Currently addicted to another version of the mindless three in a row mobile games- GardenScapes. Like Candy Crush but much harder and with a storyline.Report
I have a theory that these games mostly just come down to luck, in that on some levels, you get few enough moves relative to whatever goal you’re trying to accomplish that you simply can’t win unless you get a lucky draw. And since you only get a few attempts per hour, this means that you’re pretty much guaranteed to be stuck for hours or days.
I also have a more sinister theory, which is that the distribution of pieces isn’t actually random, but is rigged to create situations that are ideal for tempting players to pay for extra moves or extra attempts, i.e. they’re specifically engineered to frustrate people into paying. Then if you bang your head on a level long enough, they’ll let you win.
I tried Candy Crush for a while when it was really big just to see what all the fuss was about. I kept seeing a pattern where I would fail a level several times in a row, and then easily blow through the next attempt, despite not changing my strategy in any meaningful way.Report
I’ve been playing PlaneScape: Torment. It’s all right, but even wearing my 2000 goggles, I don’t get all the “greatest game ever” praise that it gets. There are an awful lot of words, and the quality isn’t high enough to justify the quantity. I think I’m going to have to replay the last few hours, because the guards in the Clerk’s Ward keep attacking me for some reason. I’m able to kill them, but I don’t know what bridges that’s going to burn.Report
I think one of the things that did it for me was that this was one of the first D&D games that understood that different, for lack of a better word, “alignments” would have different goals. (Though Fallout came out a couple of years earlier, it wasn’t set in D&D.)
And the game wanted to give each of those goals a reasonable shot at being completed. Like, if you asked “but what if I wanted to be antisocial and do X?”, the game developers thought of that too and they made that an option for you to decline.
The Bioware people said that they tracked how Mass Effect was beaten and they said that 80% of the people who beat it beat it on Paragon and only 20% of people beat it on Renegade.
But, and here’s the point, the fact that you had the option of playing Renegade made the Paragon choices that much more meaningful.
So, too, with Planescape. Now, sure, we have a lot of stuff that has been built on that game and it’s one of the giants whose shoulders we stand upon. I’d probably not call it the greatest game ever or even the greatest RPG ever.
But the people who made the greatest RPG ever? They played Planescape.Report
Yay, you liked my recommendation enough to mention it!
I was hoping it would be more meditative like Lumines or Tetris though.Report