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    Tappingo

    Game » consists of 2 releases. Released Feb 27, 2014

    An eShop exclusive puzzle game similar to Picross, except the numbers are embedded in the puzzle.

    mento's Tappingo (Nintendo 3DS eShop) review

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    Tappingo joins an increasingly populated list of worthwhile 3DS eShop purchases.

    I'm a big fan of Picross. The venerable numerical picture game has long since been a mainstay puzzle sub-genre for Nintendo consoles especially, making its debut (in the West, at least) with Mario's Picross for the original Game Boy. Since then, every subsequent Nintendo portable has been the home for some manner of mathematical paint-by-numbers, and the 3DS has an embarrassment of riches in this regard with the Picross eseries, the Virtual Console version of Mario's Picross and the backwards compatible Nintendo DS gamesPicross DS and Picross 3D.

    Tappingo isn't quite a Picross game, however. It's clearly inspired by that puzzle format, but takes a slightly different approach that adds an extra wrinkle in requiring some foresight to plan out the puzzle, yet at the same time is far more relaxed towards errors and player experimentation. Tappingo instead embeds the numbers within the puzzle, and automatically fills in lines of color depending on the direction you tap the number: ideally, you want the number of panels it fills in to match the original number on the panel. With longer numbers, it's easy to identify which of the four cardinal directions you'll want to send the line, but the myriad of "ones" and "twos" will give you more pause for thought. More often than not, you'll need to set a perpendicular "blocker" out to stop a line from going too far, and there's cases where a small network of interlacing "ones" need to be set out in a specific order for the rest of the puzzle to work. There's a good chance this all sounds like overly complicated gobbledygook, but it's the nature of puzzles like these that the player can instinctively pick up the rules after a few easy tutorial stages and be tapping away like a madman (or madwoman) to complete puzzles as quickly as they can. Tappingo's greatest strength is that it reaches this intuitive point relatively early, and the puzzle-solving flows as rapidly as you'd like: there's rarely cases where you'll be stumped for too long, and though you might have to undo the last few moves to rectify an erroneous line, it'll never be to an extent where you might wish to restart the whole stage from scratch.

    The unfortunate side to this is that it makes the game far shorter than its immense 104 puzzle inventory might suggest. Even the more difficult puzzles can be blown through in less than ten minutes once you're in "the Tappingo zone", though given that the price point is so low it's an entirely acceptable value to time ratio. There's other issues too: the nature of the game is that when you undo a move, the various lines that were being kept in check are then free to keep expanding, which means they also need to be undone. As will any lines that are emancipated from those undone lines. A single mistake could see you undoing the last half a dozen or so moves, depending on the situation. I couldn't find a simpler, instantaneous "undo" button, so undoing moves usually required that I send the line back to its origin point each time, hence all these snafus. The puzzle variety is also somewhat lacking; though the game begins with some fan-service with a few old-fashioned Nintendo controllers, the later puzzles depend on some rote animal and mythological themes. Oddly, almost a dozen puzzles are the same forward-facing animal visage with the barest of alterations made to separate them all into different species. It's a little disappointing, and suggests that the last few pages of puzzles were rushed to meet a deadline. It's clear from a designer standpoint that a single Tappingo puzzle requires more planning than a Picross puzzle due to the lattices of lines that need to be carefully considered before the puzzle can work, so here's hoping a sequel is given the extra development time it's due.

    Overall, Tappingo represents excellent value and presents a new twist on Picross for fans of the format. There's no dearth of Picross games either on the eShop service or in physical cart form if they are your wont, and I'd probably still recommend most of them before trying Tappingo if you're new to the genre, but this is a game that tries a new angle with an established formula and all but succeeds despite the few issues laid out in the previous paragraph. It's certainly not an expansive game, but for less than three bucks - a rarity given eShop's often overambitious asking prices - you can't really go wrong.

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