Another venture deep into the Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) catalogue today brought up this gem fro the first half of 2010. “Convextrix” (and this is not to be confused with the similarly-named, but utterly differently playing, “Concentrix”) does something I’ve not seen before with piece-matching puzzle games.
Instead of constantly throwing more and more colours at you faster and faster, like most gem-matching games doe to ramp up the difficulty, “Convextrix” instead increases the number of units you have to match to clear them from the playfield. What’s intriquing about this is it forces you to change your approach to the game as the difficulty increases, instead of just applying the same piece-clearing techniques more clearly to a more cluttered playfield. Strategies that helped you clear groups of three (or more) pieces might need to be overhauled to string together five, six, or seven pieces. And that innovation (forcing the player to not get complacent in their approach to the game) made it worth 80 Microsoft Points to me.
Here’s what the developer (Matthew DeLucas) has to say about the game:
“Shapes drop down and dart across the gridded aisles, connecting through electric impulses with the solitary goal of expending their energy as the breaking integer is reached while tech-inspired beats caress the aural waves until complete vicissitude. Can you get SSS in each one of this challenging, quick-paced puzzle game’s 10 zones?”
Writings of Mass Deduction 