Polimines 2 Demo Is Like A Whole New Game

PC, Mac, Linux, free

Polimines was one of the best new pure puzzle games to appear last year. With echoes of Hexcells and Picross, it was a super-smart puzzler that required methodical thinking and deduction. Rather crazily, it was only £2 (and right now is 30% off), which made it hard to hold against it that it was only 25 levels long.

Well, it’s now 30 levels long! Five excellent new puzzles have been added for free, and if you were sensible enough to buy it back then, you should definitely return to it. If you weren’t, it’s not too late. We’ll still let you join the Cool Club For Cool People. But there’s even better news!

Polimines 2 is due at the end of this year, but already has a demo on Steam, and… it’s like a whole game on its own! It’s 15 levels long, but they’re much more involved than the previous games’ challenges, this sequel building on from where the last left off.

Polimines had Hexcells-like rules, with patterns of tiles to either be deleted or highlighted based on either numbers above or to the left of columns and rows, or numbers within the deleted cells. It’s other addition were question marks, that delineated that cells needed to be shaded, but not how many, which was key to solving many of the puzzles. Polimines 2 introduces just one new element to the concept (in the demo, at least), which is ¿?, which indicates that the same number of cells are filled in for both the row and column that the symbol applies to. It seems like such a minor change, but it opens up an entirely new avenue of logical reasoning as you play, and gives the puzzles a welcome extra twist.

Developer Molter shows deft skill with these puzzle designs, ensuring there’s never any guessing required (no matter how convinced you might be otherwise while you’re missing a tiny detail). My complaint about the original game remains, that external clues don’t fade to grey once you’ve fully applied them, but you can this time right-click them to cross them out.

The only other issue I have is I really don’t like the default colour palette, but that’s not an issue given you can tweak them to be anything you like – something other similar puzzles would do well to mimic. I immediately switched it to match the colouring of Hexcells or SquareCells, because my brain finds anything else unacceptable at this point, hence these screenshots not looking like those you’ll see on the game’s store page. I love that this is possible.

I don’t really understand why Molter has decided to give this much game away for free as a demo, but I’m so delighted by it! Hopefully this is a sign that the full game could feature an awful lot more, and doubly-hopefully, Molter will charge a higher price to suit. (It’s not often I wish for higher prices, but £2 for the first game felt like he was ripping himself off!) Either way, these 15 levels are yours entirely for free, and I heartily recommend grabbing them.

• Molter
• Steam
• Free

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