It’s come to my attention recently that unless we work for a publication that specialises in the genre, games media types are woefully likely to overlook puzzle games in our coverage. This was brought home to me this summer when I was a juror for Indie Cup Europe and saw that someone (namely, Hemisquare) had submitted a lovely puzzle game called Nurikabe World. I was convinced that this game was a shoe-in for the short-list, only to find that not many other voters had quite as much enthusiasm for it as I did. It wasn’t that they didn’t think it looked good; it’s just that for many people, a simple puzzle game having the wow-factor when stacked up against big-hitters like RPGs and roguelikes is unthinkable.
I don’t know about you, but I play puzzle games way disproportionately to how often I actually talk about them when discussing my hobbies, or indeed in conversations about the games industry in general. So I was very pleased indeed to see Nurikabe World submitted for October’s Steam Next Fest, because it gives me the perfect excuse to rhapsodise about what a lovely relaxing time I had with it, and I think you will too.
Now, although I’d never played it before, I’m aware that Nurikabe itself isn’t a new game; its pen-and-paper iteration has been doing the rounds since the early 1990s, and its simple grid formation will likely put you in mind of Sudoku, although there’s not really much mechanical resemblance between the two games beyond the fact that they’re both logic puzzles.
The concept behind Nurikabe is that, using numbers given on the grid, you need to map out a series of islands of corresponding size to those numbers within a network of connected rivers – not pools, pools are too deep and wide to be rivers and therefore illegal.
In truth, Nurikabe World does an excellent job of teaching you the rules of the game in its tutorial, so even complete beginners will pick it up very quickly. And you’ll be glad you did, because while Nurikabe World isn’t the first video game to digitise Nurikabe, it is the only example I’ve seen that looks at this chill let’s-arrange-islands-and-rivers concept and goes “that sounds like it could look really pretty on PC.”
While traditional games of Nurikabe take place on a plain black-on-white grid, Nurikabe World is set on a glorious full-colour map that rewards the successful construction of an island by sprouting a little diorama on it. With different puzzle series dedicated to different seasons of the year, Nurikabe World treats you to archetypes of Japanese scenery in miniature: cherry blossom trees, bamboo groves, torii gates, shrines and pagodas stand out alongside peaceful rural landscapes featuring houses surrounded by spinneys and rock gardens.
They’re a bit like dynamic versions of the illustrative resource tiles you get in Civ or Settlers of Catan, but instead of hoovering up everything in sight to feed into city building, you just get to appreciate the beauty of the moment before moving on to the next puzzle at your own pace. Each completed square resembles nothing so much as the scene inside of a snowglobe. Add in the sort of soothing plinky music you rarely hear outside of a spa – always with a slight variation nodding to the current in-game season – and you get a game that’s simply delightful, in both senses of that phrase.
Nurikabe World doesn’t have a release date yet, but you can play the demo now on Steam. The full game aims to include daily puzzles and an infinite mode in addition to the campaign of themed puzzle sequences like those shown off in this demo, as well as a level editor allowing you to create and share your own puzzles.