Quick one for the start of the year. Mosaic is a type of puzzle similar to a minesweeper, but with all numbers visible from the start. Each number indicates the amount of coloured cells in the 3×3 region centered on the number.
2024 Retrospective is a large collage of smaller mosaic puzzles fitting together into a 60,000 tile rectangle broken up into just over 150 individual regions/puzzles. These regions range from ~60 tiles to one that is over 3000 tiles large, but most are between around 300 and 600. You can solve the regions in any order, and even partially solve a region before moving on to another. I personally cut up the larger regions into blocks of around 500, meaning I’d solve some regions to 20, 25, 33, or 50% and then moving on to solve a few smaller regions before returning to eat up the next big chunk of the large areas.
When you complete a section, the puzzle is replaced by pixel art, and for most of the regions, you’ll also unlock a small newspaper snippet showing off one of the big headlines that happened during 2024, from the big important news like the US elections, Israel/Palestine conflict, or Olympics, down to the more grounded or even silly news, like Sam Bankman Fried eating shit, Beyonce’s new album, or Willy Wonka’s Meth Lab.
And as more regions get solved, more of the picture comes together, until at the end when there is well put together and beautifully made collage celebrating 2024. A pretty stunning art piece, and each individual region does come with the conversation. Both between the player and the game, but in my personal case, between myself and my friends. There was a lot of things where I thought “oh yeah I remember that happening”, but just as many that left me stunned and confused, reaching out to friends who filled me in with what I missed, usually with a laugh for all of us together.
If you poke around the cesspool of the Steam reviews, you’ll really only find one criticism, and I wanted to address it real quick: People assert this game’s political bend is “too woke” or “from a leftist perspective.” I find this assessment to be wrong, as the game does not seem to have a political bend at all, all the headlines chosen cover objective events that happened in the year, and they are presented without spin. But if you’re one of those weird rightoids who think a picture of a woman is “too woke”, first hiiiiiii, welcome to the game review blog of a gay fox boy, please kindly feck off :3, and secondly, the developer has a few other giant mosaic games with non-news themes, but those come with a small price tag of a couple bucks. Well worth for 18-30 hours of gameplay (depending on your proficiency with these puzzles.)
Some tips for Mosaic as a puzzle type:
- 0s and 9s, (as well as 4s in corners, 6s on walls etc,) can all be filled in from the start and for most puzzles provide a good jumping off point.
- If two adjacent numbers differ by 3 (1-4, 2-5, 3-6, 4-7, 5-8) you can mark the cells exclusive to the larger number, and clear the cells exclusive to the smaller number.
- If you think about why this is the case, you’ll find that the only way to satisfy the larger number without overwhelming the smaller number is by ensuring all the cells for the smaller number also influence the larger number.
- Similar logic applies when two numbers diagonally touching differ by 5.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3380760 Free to Play
Though the game is a fundraiser for UNICEF, so consider donating to them instead.
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