Game Reviews

Quell Zen - Curb your zen-thusiasm

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| Quell Zen
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Quell Zen - Curb your zen-thusiasm
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| Quell Zen

It's hard not to think of Quell Zen as something of a misnomer.

With its fiendishly tricky puzzles that have you repeating them over and over to try and get a perfect score, Quell Frustration might have been more accurate.

When it clicks, it's a genuinely enjoyable puzzler. But its difficulty curve is too erratic to give any sense of meaningful progression.

Inhale

Quell Zen isn't much different from other Quell games. You swipe to move a raindrop in one of four directions, and it moves until it hits an object.

There's a bunch of different objectives, so while some levels task you to pick up a certain number of pearls, others require you to push gems together.

You'll also be pushing spikes out of the way, matching gendered blocks together to make them disappear, sliding through teleporters, shifting whole rows of the level… the list goes on.

New concepts are introduced at a decent pace, so you'll never feel overwhelmed by anything, but you're also unlikely to feel instantly comfortable with every new object.

Hold

Which is both a blessing and a curse, because while Quell Zen provides a solid challenge throughout, it can also be a stupidly frustrating experience.

You'll struggle through endless slogs of taxing levels, find one that finally clicks with you, and then immediately be stumped again without even the introduction of new objects.

Every time you feel like it's all making sense, you'll be thrown back to square one, and it's not a pleasant feeling.

There's also a move counter hovering around at the top of the screen that lets you know how many moves you have left until you're not perfect anymore.

It's frustrating because the levels are hard enough without having a counter reminding you of your inadequacies.

Exhale

Overall, Quell Zen is neatly presented, plays well, and will give puzzle fans a solid challenge.

When you hit your stride and it all makes sense, it does give a wonderful feeling of accomplishment, and you'll race onto the next level with glee.

But thanks to a frustrating difficulty curve, and a compulsion mechanic that aggravates instead of rewards, the only thing that's truly zen about it is the Japan-inspired visuals.

Quell Zen - Curb your zen-thusiasm

As relaxing as a sharp stick to the eye, Quell Zen has too few moments of accomplishment between its aggravating puzzles
Score
Ric Cowley
Ric Cowley
Ric was somehow the Editor of Pocket Gamer, having started out as an intern in 2015. He hopes to take over the world the same way.