Unium

Unium is a puzzle game where you need to flip black tiles back to white while drawing just one line. Simple concept yet pretty much challenging, especially in the later levels. There are over 100 levels divided into difficulty stages (Beginner > Easy > Medium > Advanced) which open up gradually with your progression, that way you can't get too ahead of yourself and your skill. The overall difficulty rises not only because of the size and complexity of the pictures, but also thanks to added elements like neutral tile or line crossing. Some levels will take only a few minutes to solve (even the advanced ones), others can twist your mind for an hour. The best strategy for solving is to go with the flow, just try to draw the line and you will see where it takes you. ^^ Once you are done with the normal levels you can play custom ones created by the players, but I haven't tried them myself though. There are also some achievements for specific ways of drawing the line in certain levels, which adds another type of a challenge.

I can recommend it to lovers of mind bending puzzles. It's great for short session playing and somehow relaxing even though few of the levels can be truly challenging and take you some time to solve them. Both music and graphics are of simple design, which is fine as you are not disturbed and can fully concentrate on the puzzles.

Similar to puzzle games like Polarium, its addictive and satisfying.
There is a feeling of progress almost the entire time even when stuck on a puzzle, as each near miss reveals patterns that can be used in a route that finally works.

Unium is a puzzle game with simple mechanics: Draw a single line in a way to cover all black squares in a grid. That’s basically it. Additionally, there are grey neutral squares, meaning covering them or not is irrelevant to completion, and you can cross over the line in the perpendicular direction. In harder puzzles, you need to cross a white square twice to reach parts of the grid. And that’s all the mechanics. Easy, right?
Wrong. The game has over 100 puzzles, with various degrees of difficulty. The advanced ones are tricky, forcing you to learn patterns that seems unintuitive. But it’s a fun game that you can play in short bursts as well. You can also find similar games on mobile, but it also works well with a mouse. All puzzles also have multiple solutions, with some achievements tied to that.
It’s also cheap, even at full price, has achievements and trading cards, Steam Cloud, and even a level editor with Steam Workshop integration. If you’re a fan of puzzle games, this is something I can recommend. And with guides, it’s also a fast game to grab all achievements, although that ruins the fun.

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[th]MY RATING:[/th]
[th] 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 [/th]
[th]10 / 10[/th]
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Minimalistic puzzle game that is fun, quite easy at the beginning and yet can be challenging.

At first I thought it would be a short game and could get boring quickly.

Well, wrong thought...

Once the game grabs you, it can happen that you don't let go of the game so quickly.
The higher the difficulty level, the trickier it gets.

In addition, the game has its own editor where you can create and share your own puzzles.
Great idea !

Really fun, can be challenging and keep you busy for hours.

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MY PROS AND CONS:

✅ different levels of difficulty
✅ tons of levels
✅ multiple ways to solve
✅ Level editor

❌ nothing

[hr][/hr] PLAYED WITH: 🖱
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⮩ VISIT ME IN MY LITTLE WORLD

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[url]https://store.steampowered.com/app/357600/Unium/[/url]

Decent-ish puzzle type game where you need to draw a path over black squares in a single motion without overlaps. Some interesting mechanics. Knowledge of graph theory useful, but not necessary. Worth maybe a dollar on sale, but not full price. Very much a mobile type game than a PC game.

The only reason I am giving Unium a marginally negative review is that too many of the advanced puzzles contain squares that need to be crossed over twice, resulting in solutions that look more like elaborate pretzels than a simple, continuous line filling a space. That is a little more complicated than what I was looking for, however if you would like the extra challenge then by all means go for it, because it is a well-made puzzle game with a lot of content.

A decent puzzle game inspired by Snake. All you have to do is draw an unbroken, non-overlapping line from one point to another. Over time this gradually becomes harder to do, with some new wrenches thrown in, but it's essentially always going to be that one line. Most puzzles have more than one solution, which is helpful, and it get intuitive over time as you see the logic in the design. All in all a well-built puzzler worth a try. If you liked this I would also check out LYNE, which has a similar premise but gets somewhat more complex.

It's fun, has decent workshop content and relaxing music. Looking at a bright white screen with high contrast, on the other hand, wasn't fun for me and I frankly don't feel like messing with my monitor settings just for this. Can't blame the game for my shitty eyes though, so refunded, but recommended.

Very relaxed puzzler, with the music adding to the nice vibe.

The interface (PC) is straight forward: click to start the drawing and hold mousebutton to drag the path/line from there.

Playing around with the controls, one might find out that one can stop dragging at any point. Later the current path/line can be picked up where left.
With "Quick Erase" enabled, a single click on a field will backtrack the current path to that field.

UNIUM is an unconventional, small yet challenging puzzle game. Master the art of drawing lines through sets of different colored squares in order to advance to the next puzzle.

Design & Art

The game is tinted in complete black and white, some greyscales included. Since UNIUM's main focus lies upon grids of squares, most of the design is quadratic as well. Don't expect anything fancy here, the design is just a backdrop for the actual gameplay, even if it looks a bit bland.

While most of the visual design is a bit lacking, UNIUM makes up for it in the very creative design of the puzzles: Most of them are shaped in some form, representing some real-life objects, which is very charming.

Controls

The game is completely controlled by mouse. UNIUM offers no introductory tutorial, yet the first levels are easy enough for beginners to solve until you get the bigger hang of it.

Sound and Music

The puzzle game features a small collection of music tracks, which one of is randomly selected once you start to solve a puzzle. All of them are really subtle and eerie synths that loop. An option to turn off the soundtrack is available. Also, the soundeffects sound fitting. Overall, the sound backdrop lightly supports the game in a positive manner, yet is easily forgettable (which is not a bad thing).

Gameplay

UNIUM revolves around puzzles, which consist of a variable sized set of different colored squares. You need to draw a line through the set of squares in order to tint all of them in one color (hence the name of the game) and thus solve given puzzle to advance to the next puzzle. The game shares similarities with LYNE (a game I already reviewed), since both revolve around drawing lines between objects.

As you grow more experienced with different techniques and strategies, puzzles will rise in difficulty as well as in quantity (over 50 puzzles on the highest difficulty). A nice design, keeping the easy puzzles small in number early on, yet later challenging you with a bigger amount of higher difficulty ones.

There is also a semi-linear advancement; If you are ripping your hair out at a certain puzzle, you can still try to solve the next one and advance, leaving one puzzle behind to solve for another day. Awesome!

While other games of the genre (e.g. LYNE) had some sort of random generator to keep the replayablity at least at some level, this game lives on through user-generated puzzles integrated via Steam's Workshop objects. Create your own puzzles in the ingame puzzle generator, which is really easy to use. Nice!

Weakpoints

I noticed some really annoying difficulty discrepancies in my playthrough. On certain levels, I was close to bashing my head in for missing a really annoying aspect of the solution, wasting more time that was actually necessary in my opinion (sometimes more than 30 minutes). But when I tried the next level for some change, I solved it within two minutes. This really striked me as odd as this happened multiple times whilst playing, so it cannot be just out of luck.

The clues for puzzles which you cannot seem to solve are really lacking. You only get a starting point as a clue, which is not enough in my opinion if you are really struggling to solve a certain one.

Music can get annoying if played for too long, either do longer pauses or turn it off as explained above.

Concluding Thoughts

UNIUM feels like the little brother of LYNE. Fortunatly, little doesn't always mean weaker or less powerful. UNIUM really has it in it, a nice game for enthusiastic puzzle solvers who really enjoyed LYNE or puzzle games overall. Bland looking visuals and simplistic sound design are just the backdrop fo the head-bashingly hard puzzles. I really need to draw the line here (very punny). A solid recommendation for any puzzle solver out there. Happy solving!

Remember Polarium for the Nintendo DS? This is essentially a 95%-accurate clone of the original, including the dry, boring visual presentation.

But hold on a minute; that isn't to say it's bad, not in the slightest. Is it still a good puzzle game? Absolutely! Is it a good mental challenge? Absolutely! And if there's any one killer feature over its source of inspiration, it's the level editor with Steam Workshop integration, giving you essentially infinite puzzles.

TL;DR version: It's like staring at a blank wall, but it's also an enjoyable mental challenge.


9/10 would stare at a blank wall again.

"Fillup patterns in a single line"

Another brilliant puzzle game by Kittehface Software.
After Transplan I was looking forward to play this basic outline pattern puzzler. But it's not so simple as I thought. You can overlap your line, use neutral fields and set your start point by yourself. That make some solutionfinding even more complicated. But still enjoyable to play. The neverending soundtrack loop is also nice.

I love this game. It's complicated and charming in it's own way. The levels require just the right mixure of complicity and simplicity. While I didn't expect much from a $2.00 game, I got at least $5.00 worth.

Also I published the FIRST Steam community level. :3

This here is the sort of game Euler probably figured out how to determine whether its solvable or not. Simple and hard, as if a really slow deliberate snake where you need to cover everything before eating yourself.

'Your task: Draw a line, a single line. How hard could that be?'

Well, yes, it could.
Nevertheless reaching 100% of the achievements is pretty easy, because there are many really good guides.
Furthermore it's a game like 'LYNE' and I really loved that game.

If you're looking for an entirely new, revolutionary puzzle game, Unium is not your game. If you're looking for a beautifully polished version of a classic puzzle form, then Unium is definitely your game. It's a low price for a few hours of good, quality puzzles. The achievements add some extra challenges that will please the most seasoned players, while the game's steady learning curve eases you into the conept. At the price of $2, it's hard not to recommend Unium.

A simple game focused around getting all the tiles the same color using a single line. At first it starts off easy then it gets more and more advanced. Some of the last puzzles were hit and miss for difficulty. Would be interesting if some of the puzzles at the end were a bit larger and more complex.

If you've played Lyne and liked it. You'll like this. Vice Versa!

A simple, fun, and at times hour-eatingly-mindstrating puzzle solving game. Just as it says, the rules are so simple - you have one line to draw. It lures you into a false sense of security with increasingly hard levels and suddenly you find yourself spending hours engaged in solving a puzzle which eludes you.

If you're an achievement hunter then you can complete all of them in <10hours. (Probably much less!) But, you won't have finished solving all the puzzles by that point!

Unium is a puzzle game with a simple concept: draw a line and turn all the blocks white. It starts out extremely basic, but soon becomes painfully difficult.
Especially on the Advanced level, where nearly every level requires you to cross lines multiple times and really think outside the box, you'll need a lot of time to solve the puzzle.

Recommended for any puzzle game fan!

I love this game. It's price point is cheap (that said there is no replayability here). It's a true mind bender that is simple to understand and get the hang of.

PROs
+It's innovative and different
+Simple to play
+Cards and Achievements (for $1.49 @25% off - you can't go wrong)

CONS
+It's too easy to look at a guide..!

SUGGESTIONs?
+DEV may consider adding custom level(s) or workshop (but again for $1.49 it's not a complaint)

10/10