Minefield Fractalis

I've been an avid Minesweeper player for many years and consider myself fairly adequate. I've seen many good clones of the game. Unfortunately, this is not one of them. It claims to eliminate the guessing element by allowing you to search below the top layer. But there is an important exception to that rule. You must acquire Phase Walkers to stabilize your air supply for this task, or else you will lose armor. You begin each game with three points of armour. There was another game that I recommended called "MineDeeper" that successfully used the same principle of digging below the top layer to get around the 50/50 guesswork of Minesweeper.

Phase Walkers appear on the map as random glyphs that you must collect. The game never informs you how many of these you have collected, and in some challenges, you need to acquire a certain number of them to pass the level. For example, I was stuck on the third challenge for Mars, where you must stabilize ten or more Phase Walkers. I was unsuccessful since clicking on a Phase Walker glyph opens up a new layer below the surface. The two areas below the top surface are very tiny, and it's very easy to click a mine by accident. Unless you are very lucky or a good guesser (which I am not), you will have to keep restarting your game over again. Then, if you haven't collected enough of these, you must purposely make a mistake on the top layer to find more glyphs hiding randomly below. I've never played a game before that encouraged me to make a mistake on purpose. Because I was not able to collect ten or more glyphs, and since the game never told me how many Phase Walkers I had, I was not able to unlock any of the other worlds. Speaking of which, I also encountered another problem where the game notified me that I had unlocked the planet Pluto and Jupiter, but these planets never appeared anywhere, so I was unable to play them.

Most Minesweeper games allow you to chord. You click once to reveal all of the safe cells that are already known. Unfortunately, you must manually click on every cell here. The game lacks instructions and expects you to figure out on your own how each planet is played. This can only be done by trial and error. I've never been keen on those types of games. They waste time, and my time is very precious.

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For a puzzle game, there’s a purpose behind your actions. It’s still all very basic stuff, since you’re scanning planets in search of materials, but you can read a few lines in the terminal. You’ll go through around 10 systems, each with several planets, starting on Earth and in the Solar System.

Although planets or puzzles within a system are played out of order, which means you might start on the third Earth puzzle instead of the first Mercury puzzle, there’s still a more or less linear progression because solving one planet unlocks another, and in some cases you get two or three. Access to other systems becomes available when you beat the required planet, which is always indicated on a locked planet or system.

The main mechanic is the same as classic Minesweeper. You have a grid on which you click tiles and look for threats. Clicking a safe tile reveals a number that tells you how many threats surround it. Clicking a threat, however, takes away one point of armor. The armor system is great because it fixes Minesweeper’s main problem: failing a puzzle due to situations where you’re forced to guess.

But there’s a twist. Threats aren’t mines but passages that send you deeper into the planet, to another random grid that can be smaller or larger. This new grid may also contain passages, sending you even further. If you solve these additional grids, you won’t lose armor. But failing one will remove armor and send you back to the previous grid. The puzzle’s maximum depth matches your armor level. You can fail these additional grids, but if you lose all your armor on the main grid, the game is over.

Depending on your skill and luck, you might never have to deal with these extra puzzles. But while some give you a random grid, others are more structured. For example, on Venus, your first tile is always safe, while everything else is a threat. Still, there’s much more hidden in this game because you never know what mechanic you’ll encounter. For instance, mines may turn into sheep and move as you click, clues on one edge of the grid may transfer to the opposite edge, you may have to follow a helpful cat to find safe tiles, or clues may slowly disappear with each click. The rules are never explained, so you’ll have to observe how things react.

Beating a puzzle is enough to progress, but if you want to fully complete it, each puzzle has two additional challenges, giving you a total of three stars. You don’t have to earn them all in one attempt, so you can focus on the ones you’re missing, though some are very difficult and depend heavily on luck.

Even this game is playable, lack of explanation of any game mechanic (such as recursive, game interface...) makes this game very hard to pick up.