If you’re a puzzle fan and you haven't played a PathPix game yet, you’re missing out. PathPix Joy is the fifth in the iOS series, and if you’ve dabbled in an earlier entry you’ll know exactly how ridiculously, hypnotically compulsive these nifty little puzzlers really are.
As with all great puzzle games, it’s tougher to explain PathPix Joy than it is to play. For the uninitiated, it goes something like this: each stage features a grid, liberally dotted with numbered, coloured circles. You’re tasked with tracing lines between pairs of circles to fill the grid and complete the picture.
Connect the dotsEach start and end point must be the same colour and digits indicate the number of squares your line must pass through. Lines can weave around the grid as much as you like, provided all other criteria are met.
Increasingly, you’ll need to flex your logic muscles to fill the grid, eking out new pathways using existing lines and potential routes.
Unlike other variations on the PathPix formula, there’s no fail state and no penalty for incorrect moves. While that can make the going a little tough - you won’t always realise you’ve messed up till the end of a puzzle, for instance - it means you’re under no particular pressure to get the job done, giving the game a steady, appealingly sedate pace.
Quick on the drawAlthough PathPix Joy won’t win any awards for its workman-like presentation, the game’s touch-based interface is wonderfully implemented.
Line-drawing is simply a case of dragging your finger between dots, and you’re given all sorts of helpful visual cues as you go. Occasional issues arise during larger puzzles, where shifting to off-screen areas of the grid can be a bit clumsy, but for the most part it’s intuitive and unintrusive enough to let you get lost in the puzzling.
With 99 increasingly complex puzzles to work your way through, you get a lot of mileage for you money. It’s true that Joy doesn’t do much to develop the existing PathPix formula, but if you’re already familiar with the series’ hellishly addictive brand of intuitive, unhurried puzzling then these new puzzles are a no-brainer.
And if you’re a PathPix virgin, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
PathPix Joy
Once you’ve got into PathPix Joy’s tightly focused, gently paced logic puzzling, good luck getting out
Matt Wales
Following a lifetime of adventure on the high seas, swabbing the editorial decks of the good ship IGN and singing freelance shanties across far-flung corners of the gaming press, Matt hung up his pirate hat and turned his surf-seared gaze toward the murky mysteries of the handheld gaming world. He lives to sound the siren on the best mobile games out there, and he can't wait to get kraken.