Colorful Puzzle Games by Snapbreak

I have been having a lot of fun playing what I think of as "colorful puzzle games".  These are apps with a highly graphical theme, where each level has some series of visual puzzles to solve.  You usually have to find some wire or battery or key or wrench and figure out where it goes to unlock more complex puzzles.  Or the other way around: you see a cabinet with a hexagonal hole and have to go find whatever crank or screwdriver will fit.  The basic "find the object" parts are usually preety easy, but they tend to have a relaxing vibe and the developers go out of their way to throw in some visual effects that you never see coming.  A simple suitcase might cause the entire platform around it to twist and rise up and open into some weird computer console.  What looks like a violin might unpack into a missile silo.  I have to give these developers credit for imagination and attention to detail, and though every one of these apps has Google Play reviews saying the hitboxes were screwed up (or whatever they go on about), I have played all the way through a bunch of them with no issue.

You can usually spend the extra gems or batteries you find along the way to get hints, or even skip a whole puzzle once or twice per game if you're not in the mood to click those dots five hundred times.  Since I have Google Play Pass, the games I have been playing all came completely unlocked.  Nothing to buy.

The games I have been running were all made by Snapbreak.

Project Terrarium was a world of mostly blue and gold gadgets and buildings, where your goal for each level is to unlock some kind of terraforming device to bring life back to the world.  You have to look carefully for patterns of icons or numbers etched on walls or tucked away under debris, then use them as the keys to the puzzles.  There were about 20 levels here, very enjoyable.


Tiny Robots was a world of, well ... tiny robots and more gadgets.  There was some kind of story about the evil guy who was setting up all these obstacles.  There were some levels marked as boss levels where you had to unscrew things and unlock puzzles to beat the boss, but those were about the same as regular levels with a cut scene or two around them.  Some of the effects were real surprises -- there was a level with boy and girl robots sitting on the grass, not responding to anything you do, but when you throw some TNT down a pipe, three robot mice come out and scare them away ... I never would have seen that coming.  There were four sets of four main levels, and if you gathered enough blue and purple gems you could unlock "Epilogue 1" and "Epilogue 2".  Um, I'm not going to give spoilers or break down every puzzle, but I think it would have been much more rewarding if I had done "Epilogue 2" first.  Then you could end on the more positive note of the two.

I just finished Escape Machine City: Airborne last night.  Same developer.  This all takes place on a futuristic airship, and the imagery is gorgeous.  I was surprised when I landed the ship after only about 14 levels and the game was over, though. I saw reviewers saying you get 7 levels for free and then pay about $5 to unlock the other 7, and it wasn't enough.  But again, Google Play Pass delivered it unlocked.  My favorite level was the game room:  you have to find a ticket and put it into the little train, then hit 0, 1 or 2 on the dashboard of the train to move from one part of the level to another.  It was so much fun to unlock and explore.   Along the way, you have to find four gears: one is in a claw game where you have to grab it successfully, one is around the backside of the "hit the bell" game upstairs, and for another, you have to throw balls at plastic cups to unblock it (don't forget to look under the balls in that bowl on the right for an important knob).  I think the last one was inside a door opened by a circuit box whose pattern was shown on a wall up on floor 2.  The final level also had a lot of pieces, where you look in a viewer to find a beacon, make note of the two symbols, move sliders on a navigation map to match those two symbols to find the N and E coordinates you have to tap into the computer, just to get the main steering wheel and another little puzzle before crashing the whole ship. 

May 5 update: I am just wrapping up Doors: Awakening, another fine entry in this collection.