When all the colorful cool kids at the coffee klatsch create a conga line, you know they're concocting a crazy cotillion. But can you slide the squares in a sequence to spawn a specific shape? That's the challenge behind Mosaic Mingle, a puzzle game by Acoders where your goal is to rebuild an image one square at a time. It's not as easy as it sounds though, because the order of your tiles is restricted by a colorful conga line.
Each tile in the 8x8 mosaic must be slid in from one of the four sides. A tile will keep sliding until it runs into another tile or the edge of the grid. Click one of the outlined spaces in the grid to slide a tile into that spot. Your tiles are offered to you one at a time in the order indicated by the snaking line on the left, with your current tile at the top. The trick here is that the tiles aren't necessarily arranged in a pattern conducive to an easy solve. If you're not careful, you might block out tight corners in the grid, making it impossible to slide blocks into place.
After you've played through the levels in normal mode (where the squares are always in the same order, often in large color clusters), you can tackle them again in challenge mode where the squares are shuffled in a random order. There are 25 easy puzzles and 25 hard puzzles with more colors and trickier patterns to fill. For those who are colorblind, there is an option to add shapes to the tiles and grid, but the black/white icons aren't always the easiest to distinguish. But if you're looking for a puzzle that surprises you with a challenge, jump in the line and rock your mosaic in time!
I love how the menu music sounds like a game show theme.
"Hey, let's play a game where we click on each and every square in an 8x8 grid in a particular order so we can continue on to another level that's even more monotonous!!"
No, let's not.
I'm sorry if that sounds harsh. But I just didn't find the "fun" in this game. After about three clicks in the very first level, I was like, "Sweet mother of patience. Is this how the entire rest of the game is played?"
I couldn't force myself to continue. Sorry, it's just not for me.
It's a very fun game that requires a descent amount of thinking under a set amount of time, but I wish that you could change the controls, because my hand began to hurt from clicking so much; I use a touchpad instead of a mouse.
So, I solved the first 5 puzzles on Easy, and no new puzzles have unlocked, which means the game is basically stuck/broken for me. Any ideas?
@chibidani: To unlock the next set of levels, you need to play two or three of the challenge levels. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the requirement to unlock the next set of levels is to play through seven or eight of the ten puzzles in each "row" (five normal, five challenge).
It seems to me that it could be much improved, as has been said, with a relatively simple control change; something like "use the arrow keys to fire blocks". Have two options, so that "left arrow fires from the left blockshooter", or "left arrow fires a block to the left". That way you can choose which seems more natural to you, and you still aim with the mouse. I think it would make things feel much smoother.
As it is, though, the controls ruin any enjoyment that the interesting idea puts forth. Too much clicking.
As others have noticed, the review is incorrect: you *can't* play all the levels in Normal mode, you're forced to play some at in Challenge mode before it'll unlock more in Normal mode. Which is unfortunate, because if I'm feeling like playing in Normal mode, I am *not* feeling like playing in Challenge mode, and vice versa. :/
I liked it. The retro music was a nice surprize.
Update