Nurikabe World

PC, Mac, Linux

I spent an hour or so tidying my Steam Wishlist this week, realising that of the 450-ish games on there, a bunch were added in 2018 and clearly never going to happen, a good number had been deleted from existence, and far more had gained enough notoriety that by the time they were released they were out of this site’s purview. I managed to whittle it down to just over 200, and in doing so, found a bunch of games that had come out that I’d not covered, but still believe deserve to be. Among them is a completely superb logic puzzle game called Nurikabe World.

I love a bit of Nurikabe. Not so much the Japanese yōkai, but more the puzzle format in which grids are filled in based on forming contiguous paths of tiles based on a number contained in each. I’m used to playing them via the essential Conceptis mobile app, but Nurikabe World brings the concept into beautiful life with some stunning animation and presentation.

As with all of these sorts of logic puzzle, they’re far more complicated to describe in words than they are to watch in practice, so let’s save a lot of bother and watch Nurikabe World‘s moment in the spotlight, when it featured on Cracking The Cryptic.

So rather than the traditional rectangular grid, here puzzles can be in elaborately-shaped spaces, even with holes within the levels. Even better, on eliminating tiles such that a string is cordoned off to the correct number, it then blossoms into life, growing trees and traditional Japanese buildings, with finished puzzles looking utterly gorgeous.

Nurikabe is such an interesting puzzle format because, unusually, it has so many rules. With most of its ilk (Picross, Sudoku, Slitherlink, Numberlink, etc), you just follow the one central rule to solve the grid. But in Nurikabe, your logic to deduce how the tiles are grouped have extra limitations. You’re not allowed a 2 by 2 grid of eliminated tiles, for instance. And the resulting route of eliminated spaces must be connected across the whole puzzle. Nurikabe World so brilliantly makes apparent these rules with its conceit of removing land to leave water. You’re making one interconnected waterway, with no sections of river to be separate from the rest. Have 2×2 removed and a whirlpool appears, and we don’t want those. Visualising these details makes it so much more appealing.

And gosh, for a game that costs less than a tenner (significantly less in the current Steam sale), there are so many puzzles! Of what I’d describe as “traditional” versions of Nurikabe, there are a stunning 150! On top of that, you then have a further 85 of what it calls “Variance”, where new rules are introduced, such as pairing numbers together in runs of tiles, and even after that, another 65 advanced puzzles! And that’s not to mention the “Infinite” mode, and player-created puzzles, along with the puzzle creating tools. Wow.

And they’re really good puzzles, too. Where Nurikabe in its regular puzzle book form is pleasantly absorbing, it’s rare for them to be capable of wit–not so here, where the varying shapes of grids, and surprise concepts popping up here and there, makes the human hand and imagination behind their creation far more obvious.

I’m thrilled with Nurikabe World, and I’m so delighted I went back through my Wishlist to rediscover it. It introduces all the complexity of this logic puzzle with smart design, alerting you to specific rules or useful techniques across its first few dozen levels, but reaching a difficulty that is rewarding for long-time aficionados. And it’s so pretty! I really can’t stress enough how pretty it is.

• Hemisquare
• Steam
• £8.50/$10/€10 (25% off these prices at the time of writing)
• Official Site

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