COLORISTIC

Author: Martin Borik, ub880d

Memory: 48K/128K Released: 2020

Ah, the sedate puzzle game; lives aren’t at stake, there is no approaching menace to thwart and there is no time limit to hinder one’s progress.

The mobile phone market is a common place for such “toilet seat” entertainment these days, so it’s good to see it return to a format which doesn’t have a huge abundance of games of this genre.

Coloristic is a minimalistic puzzler based on the mobile game of the same name. The main idea is for the player to fill all the squares on a tile-based grid by moving a coloured line, square by square and within a finite number of moves. Your origin square, where you start off from indicates how many moves you have and you can move in any 90 degree direction from there, barriers permitting. All moves must be taken, so for example, if your start point states ‘5’ then you must use up all five moves. With each step, the counter deducts by one, therefore it’s easy to keep tabs on your movements.

This is simple enough in the first few levels as there is only one line available to manoeuvre around the grid. As the game progresses you find yourself in control of up to five different lines (all can be chosen with the numeric keys at any time) and you must logically solve the correct routes for all of them — all moves must be used up. The learning curve gradually builds up over the 80 levels and by the last 20, you will most certainly be challenged to the max.

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CRITICISM

The first thing that appeals to me in Coloristic is the look of it. It looks like an inbuilt game that you would choose from the Spectrum 128K menu.

The off-white background, the shadowed boxes and the fonts used all add up to make it look operating system bespoke.

It is a lovely slow-paced game in which I had all the time in the world to make my decisions. At first, it was rather easy and the early levels acted as a simple tutorial. But before I knew it, the difficulty crept up and I found myself my attention starting to wane — I felt

I had seen and played enough. Repetition aside, I found the game really enjoyable and I loved the brilliant AY music that accompanied the experience.

Gordon King