Brain Exercise 3

I love a good story. Even those weird, nonsensical ones you normally find in puzzle games, or ones that have been mangled through TranslatorBot 4000’s massive claws delight me.

So I really shouldn’t have been that surprised that the good Dr Kawashima’s new title (well, Namco Bandai’s to be exact) has a lengthy story about maths college, finding love, and partying.

Yet surprised I was, because that’s just a little bit too surreal a concept for this brain to cope with. I mean, maths and parties? Maths and girls? Does. Not. Compute.

Sidestepping the stereotyping for dummies chapter for a second, the big, shiny new feature for the titan of the brain training sub-genre is a large Story mode that takes place across a university campus.

It’s really a flimsy excuse to string together maths and memory puzzles, but does act as a bit of light relief from all the serious stuff. Like the doctor eerily smiling as he chides you for being a dog.

And chide you he will, because Brain Exercise 3 has gotten a bit brainier than its competitors, offering up a number of difficult puzzles alongside the usual ‘might be a challenge if I had no fingers or eyes’ suspects.

This is partly due to some wonky explanations, Arithmetic 2 being the prime candidate for phone rage in this household. Most of the time, however, it’s because they’re genuinely more advanced than the standard fare.

Standouts include the visual illusion maze that is The Shortest Way and the excellent, self-explanatory, Add Numbers to 11, which is essentially the maths equivalent of my favourite solitaire card game Pyramid.

Work is Play

If you hadn’t already noticed, the puzzles lack a certain zest with their titling, and this carries through to the presentation. Everything is perfectly clean, well drawn and clear to read, but incredibly sterile compared to some of its nearest rivals.

Add Numbers to 11, for instance, could, and really should, have been made from decks of cards seeing as it’s based on a card game. Instead it’s just the same boring digits stacked up alongside each other.

If you don’t mind the psychotherapy presentation, though, there’s a hell of a lot to like about Brain Exercise 3. Features like online Facebook link up and the reliable daily exercises, complete with all those lovely stats and graphs, complementing the simple and effective controls perfectly.

And then there are the unlockable, randomly generated Kakuro puzzles - an extremely generous extra if you’re tired of solving sudokus, which really should be everyone by now.

So while Brain Exercise 3 doesn’t exactly push new boundaries, it makes up for it by introducing enough new features and content to make it worth looking into.