Adjacency


Jul 30, 2020

Adjacency

There are a lot of puzzle games in this bundle, or maybe I'm just having bad luck with the games I pull. It could be a platform thing as well. Luckily for me, the puzzle game disliker, Adjacency is a very good puzzle game!

Adjacency is one of many sort of minimalist puzzle games: the shapes and colors and look are pretty simple, interacting is mouse driven with a few moments wanting to click-and-drag. You click shapes and their color pours out into adjacent shapes, with the goal of getting the right colors into the right shapes. The game does a lot with special blocks to make things not nearly as simple. From shapes that are destroyed after one click on them, gears that rotate adjacent pieces around, pools of color inside other shapes, there's a lot of fun exercises to be had here.

Honestly, what I liked most about Adjacency were that the puzzles didn't make me feel too stupid, and the ones that did, I could easily skip. Adjacency was very, very friendly about getting me to through its blocks of levels. There's a requirement to complete a certain amount of puzzles to complete, but I thought I was pretty generous on skipping stuff and still got through no problem. The game did a decent job of having the first couple puzzles introducing a mechanic be insightful.

Though, a couple times I wish it just went ahead and showed some text telling me how a block worked - the cog requires a click-and-drag when nothing suggested this would ever be something I did. I'm still not 100% sure how to use pools properly. I also wasn't too keen on the background ambience, which was more dissonant to my ears than anything.

Overall, though, Adjacency was a puzzle game I kept playing for the sake of playing it, curious to see what the next mechanic introduced would be, owing to its reasonable difficulty and generous level skipping if I felt truly stuck. Coming from me, that's hopefully strong praise.

I enjoyed it. Adjacency is a good game.