Count Logica

Reluctantly I'm gonna have to vote against this one.

On the surface level this is somewhat of a mix between Hexcells and nonograms. Each number represents how many entities you can see by following the path from that line to the other end; mirrors may change this trajectory and even loop through the same tile sometimes. Zombies are always seen. Vampires are only seen before hitting any mirrors and don't count otherwise. Ghosts are only seen after at least one mirror. And similarly to minesweeper-like games you get to know how many of each entity type is left to place on the board.

It's generally fun but the further you go the more level design falls apart (for me at least). There are 100 levels for each of the 4x4, 5x5, and 6x6 categories and it is obvious that they've all been randomly generated and thrown together. Some levels take literally four seconds to solve while others can get me stuck for a full hour. It just feels like the levels were not curated by a human designer after being procedurally generated.

It's fun to find not so obvious moves but sometimes you have to make an assumption like "okay, suppose this tile is a vampire, what happens next?", and then solve a LOT of further-branching paths (all in your head) to find obscure contradictions in every case to make the deduction that this original tile is not, in fact, a vampire. Problem is, there's no undo button, no planning overlay like in Tametsi, and due to how the game works it's just humanly impossible to keep all of this information in your head (tons of intersecting lines all having different meanings depending which direction you're coming from, it's inhumanly hard). So I end up taking screenshots and recreating my partial solutions while trying to make a deduction. It was at this point I realized that I cannot recommend the game for this very reason.

Technically, all levels are solvable without guessing. But due to the uncontrollable difficulty maybe ~30% of levels are trivially easy while ~10% require thinking ten steps ahead in a game where it just happens to be super difficult to think more than a step or two ahead. Unlike a computer I cannot operate on an assumption based on another assumption based on another assumption based on another assumption then backtrack through this mind tree to exhaust all possibilities.

A faithful if flawed adaption of David Millar's classic Haunted Mirror Maze puzzle game. On the plus side, it is a faithful adaption of this nonogram/picross sort of puzzle, with the same vampires, ghosts and zombies as in the original Adobe-Flash game. Still the game could have used a bit more polishing and play-testing: many levels are uneven in difficulty (super-easy levels are sprinkled in with very hard ones) and the music is insipid. It is a faithful rip-off of the original game, but I feel that there was a missed opportunity to explore new features. Millar is often creating variations with one-way mirrors and what-have-you, but he had nothing to do with this... an extremely bare-bones adaption, lacking both originality and innovation.

For those unfamiliar with Millar's game: you have a board with numbers on each side of a row. Inside that row there may be / and \ slashes, symbolizing mirrors. A zombie is worth 1 point in front of or behind a mirror, a vampire is worth 1 point only in front of a mirror (and zero behind it) and a ghost is worth 1 point only behind a mirror (and zero in front of it.) Therefore, if you have a slash mirror in your row, and the row is worth no points, you know that there can be only ghosts in front of it and only vampires behind it. This is a 100% straightforward adaption of that game.

I was originally going to give this a thumbs-up, because it technically works all right and I thought it was a fun and unique concept, but once I googled 'haunted house maze' and found out that this game has been around for at least 15 years on Millar's own site ... well then I was left judging this as a 'port' of the original game. Then this becomes just 'is this a good version of this puzzle game?' as opposed to 'hey, look at this fun new concept!' In that case, all the issues I have with the U.I., the terrible music and the uneven level design take center stage. (One good quality-of-life feature, the ability as in Picross puzzles to mark in few choices when you're not ready to decide on a final choice is a bit of a wash-- puzzles were either so easy that I did them in my head and breezed through them, or they required me to pull out some paper and do them manually.)

I really feel there was a missed opportunity here by Smokey to make this game his own. Why not some levels without mirrors, or perhaps levels with an owl that counts as a 'zero' on either side of the mirror, or perhaps a cross-hatch mirror? Perhaps some variation in shapes such as a 2 x 3 or a 3 x 4 rectangle instead of a square board.

I also feel that there should have been some 2 x 2 levels to start with, as there really wasn't much of a tutorial, and it takes a few minutes to remember what zombies, vampires and ghosts do and don't do. And there wasn't even a story or campaign, such as of a fairy sipping tea with a wizard for 100 levels, as you might find in a similar card or puzzle game.

Charming little Halloween themed logic puzzle game in the style of sudoku/ nonograms, but different enough to feel like its own thing, especially the 'mirror' mechanic. It's good if you like those types of puzzles, but if you don't, then this game is unlikely to change your mind.

There are 300 levels in total, 100 for each grid size: 4x4, 5x5, 6x6. The mechanics stay the same throughout; no new ones are added as you progress through the levels, though that isn't really a problem for this type of game. They can all be completed without any guesswork, which is great. The difficulty varies across levels, from almost trivial to brain-breakingly hard, though instead of following a steady progression, it is scattered all over the place, and there are no difficulty markers to indicate how hard a level is, so you have no idea how challenging a level is until you actually try it, though smaller-sized levels are understandably easier than the bigger ones on average.

It's good value for money considering the amount of content you get for such a low price. It took me around 5 hours to complete 70+ 4x4 levels as well as a few bigger-sized levels, so I imagine it would take 20+ hours to finish the whole game. While I didn't find it as interesting or fun as something like Hexcells (or its sequels), it's still a pretty decent logic puzzle game.

This is a great puzzle game. It's an old game and I've seen a different version called Haunted Mirror Maze. You can probably play it free somewhere, but it's cheap here and this is a really good version. It lets you eliminate choices and maps out paths. It's kind of like a sudoku where you ;have to place items in a grid, but the things you are placing are monsters and there are mirrors in the grid. Each monster has a different effect on mirrors so it's a puzzle to get them all in right. There are three hundred levels and there is great replay value because it's not like you;re going to remember exactly how you solved one the first time where you put the twenty or so monsters. If you like logic puzzle games at all I highly recommend it.

The puzzle concept here is decent, and something I might briefly enjoy in a paper puzzle book. But as a video game, I found it utterly underwhelming. Puzzles are randomly generated, and so don't contain any Eureka moments. The screen is entirely static and devoid of any animations. And the music is one short mediocre repetitive loop which I had to turn off.

Do not recommend.

Watched a quick youtube video to get the idea how to play this, and have been enjoying this minesweeper/hexcells esque game.

A nice puzzle game with 300 levels, each of which take between 2 and 3 minutes on average. The 4x4 and 5x5 levels are shorter, the 6x6 grids take a bit longer. The puzzles are not too challenging, a few even are too simple and basically solve themselves, but in general most of them are good. They all feel very similar and apart from very few late game levels, this feels more like a casual activity rather than a taxing puzzle. Sadly, I needed bifurcation for exactly 2 of the late game puzzles, which makes me doubt that these puzzles are handcrafted. And why would they be. The 4x4s and 5x5s rarely give enough space to hide any interesting deductions.

Overall a nice little game which is definitely worth the small asking price.

just one more

Interesting puzzle game with a good number of puzzles.

My only complaint is there seems to be no reasonable progression - the trivially easy puzzles were interspersed amongst incredibly challenging puzzles.

Recommended for those who appreciate a good logic puzzle, or 300.

Very good variation of the classic nonogram, with three grid sizes and 300 increasingly difficult levels.

crafting little good (very good!) games is something this dev already did with Mindsight

https://store.steampowered.com/app/716070/Mindsight/

a cleverissimo little one that then led me try the Flagsplosion one

https://store.steampowered.com/app/652340/Flagsplosion/

...decided, finally, to grab this one.
played very little, but definitely confident i'll appreciate it very much

A fun, casual twist on Nonograms. The puzzles are small (one might even say bite-sized :P) so they're great for breaks and other small chunks of time and the gameplay is completely logic-driven (no guessing!).

Not only runs great on Linux (Mint 18.2, Nvidia proprietary) but developed on it, too! ¡Viva los Pingüinos!

Highly recommended to people who like puzzle games which appear in paper magazines, like Sudoku or Picross. It uses its own ruleset, simpler than Sudoku, about as simple as Picross, and the ruleset is different enough to provide a new experience for puzzle fans. If you are a fan of puzzle games but have become bored with the usual fare of Picross and Sudoku games, this one is a must buy.

Imagine a 4 by 4 cells Sudoku or Picross that nevertheless takes 5-10 Minutes to solve. Most puzzles in this game are in that difficulty range, with a bunch of easy levels at the beginning of the 4x4 puzzle section, and a few puzzles even in the 4x4 puzzle section which cannot be solved without test-placing a monster to see if a solution can be reached from there. I have not reached the last 5x5 and 6x6 puzzles yet, but expect a few equally difficult puzzles there.

The game would still be worth the money if they raised the price to 3€, so at the current full price of 1.59€ it's a steal.

Amazing little puzzle game, by the creators of 'Flagsplosion' and 'Mindsight' !
it's like a super version of a picross game, where numbers indicate how many monsters there are.
Except it's not always on a straight line ; the path includes change of directions when a mirror is met.

Pros
• 3 * 100 = 300 levels !
• Challenging : from any point of view (before or after a mirror), always 2 types of monsters share the same visibility. You rarely can't be sure of the correct combination without further analyze.
• Learning : make false assumptions while being confident they are true, and learn from your mistakes
• Rational : solve every level by using logic only
• 5 levels always unlocked, per pack (4x4, 5x5, 6x6) - if you're stuck, just do the next one and comeback later to that #@$! one later ;)

I'm a general fan of puzzle games ; I like this one for its game mechanisms without being annoying.
Just have a try, guys !