Critical Play: Puzzles

I chose to play Factory Balls, a super simple and quirky game about matching patters with orders and operations to paint factory balls.

The magic of the mechanics of the game lies in their simplicity. For every puzzle, we are given an objective ball which basically details what we want the ball to look like for the final package. Then we are given a list of 3 to 5 (sometimes more) possible actions we can take. These include covering some part of the ball, painting the ball and removing our covers. That is basically it. Then with these few possible operations, we explore the vast array of possibilities of patterns we can build.

The onboarding process does a great job at explaining the essence of the game. The game walks you through how to add a cover, remove a color and add some paint. After that it is all you!

Because the game mechanics are so simple, as users we are almost forget about the mechanics themselves and can focus on the puzzle. When playing the game, we don’t think about how to color something or cover something, these are basically ubiquitous in their integration. All our brain power is used to think, explore and plan out how we will achieve the desired result.

I value how the game got increasingly hard as we moved from one level to another, which definitely allowed me to get ramped up to speed before feeling logically challenged. I will add as well that there is a high level of grip in this case. As soon as you finish a challenge you want to move on to the next and you can’t really let go of a puzzle until you have finished it. It is addictive!

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