Once upon a time, Minesweeper was a deceptively simple logic puzzler you’d find bundled on many Windows PCs, but “deceptive simplicity” ain’t enough for today’s Maximum Gamer, whose brain has been honed through years of multiple browser tab usage to operate in 10450302 dimensions at once. And so I give you Minesweeper: Next-Gen.
It’s broadly the same process of trying to clear a board of hidden explosives, with numbers on cleared tiles indicating the number of bombs nearby. But these boards – they are decidedly eccentric.
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As the Steam page summarises: “Boundaries can wrap or flip seamlessly; some tiles split into smaller components; certain regions of the map may map onto others, even forming recursive structures.” Rest assured, you will never feel such hatred for the inventors of tessellation (I think it was the Sumerians) as when playing Minesweeper: Next-Gen, which has a demo.
If all of the above suggests a game of dusty, self-cannibalising mathematics, Minesweeper: Next-Gen is actually rather personality-led. It’s a game within a game, featuring two mascot characters – a portly dinosaur, his face a mask of sorrow, and a quarrelsome duck who wears gloves and shoes. They lurk on the margins of each puzzle like chibi Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, their tense expressions at odds with the game’s lilting soundscape of boops and pops.
“These two mysterious little companions will accompany you along the way,” the Steam page continues. “Sometimes they offer helpful hints, and sometimes… not so much. Observant players might uncover fragments of their story – though it’s not particularly important, it does add a bit of charm.” I think “pathos” is the word they’re looking for. A duck who wears gloves and shoes is clearly a duck at odds with his own nature, chafing at the capacities of duckdom.
The full game launches later this year, and will include an editor “where you can choose from 200+ distinctive geometric tessellations maps, customize tile colors with a brush tool, and combine countless rules to design your own levels”. You do not have to be a duck or a dinosaur to wield the editor effectively, but it can’t hurt. For something more fantastical and less tessellatory, try Dragonsweeper.
