Flow Fit: Sudoku

If you like Flow Free and the like, you should not expect to automatically take to this. But like the other Flow puzzles, the premise is simple: place the puzzle pieces so no number repeats in the same row or column. Quite easy to start and it doesn’t get difficult for several sets maybe 50 or 80 puzzles in all. Too long I believe, but similarly to the Flow Free types, I wanted to have my statistics show perfect scores, so although you are allowed to jump ahead once you recognize the basic way to solve the puzzle at hand, if you skip, you miss that star. I don’t think I will be as obsessed with this as I am with Flow Free on which I have just passed a full year of its Daily Streak puzzles.

Flow Fit is a genuinely fun, interesting, and unique extension of Sudoku. I play a lot of grid puzzles so my perspective may be skewed, but I found the initial levels (ranked easy and medium difficulty) to be extremely dull. The answers were almost all immediately obvious. However, once I skipped ahead to the hard packs, it was a totally different game and quite a lot of fun. The challenge is similar to playing moderate/hard Sudoku without using notes. The use of shapes lessens the difficulty a bit, unfortunately-- if there's only one T-shaped piece left, there's going to be one T-shaped slot available, so if you've been playing correctly you can pretty much ignore the numbers for several pieces per game. Still, I'm very happy with this game, and look forward to playing it a lot more.

This game is a unique take on sudoku, using various shaped tiles instead of entering each number directly. The levels are generated in a way that allows them to be solved logically without guess work. I have played tens of thousands of rounds of regular sudoku, using the various strategies and annotations to solve without trial and error. Unfortunately this game has a serious flaw, which is that the difficulty quickly becomes so great that it becomes pure tedium to try and identify a valid move. This happens towards the end of the “hard” levels. The fundamental flaw is that the game provides no mechanism to make annotations on the game board. Yes, you can position pieces around the outside of the board, but that provides only the most primitive assistance. There is simply no way I would be taking notes on a piece of paper in order to try and solve the puzzles in this game. I feel this game is going to turn too difficult too quickly for most casual players, and it doesn’t provide enough tools for hard core players to reasonably solve the difficult puzzles. That only leaves guess work and luck, which is not why people play these sorts of games. 3/5 for now.