Zentomino

Jigsaws can easily be seen as a waste of cheap cardboard. They’re like a console that can only play a single game and that’s the kind of entertainment that hasn’t cut the gaming mustard since Atari’s Pong in the 70s.

Now, if you could rearrange the pieces to make an entirely different picture or fathom a new solution to the puzzle, then jigsaws might have a bit more mileage.

Which brings us to Zentomino. It’s not fair to call this new iPhone puzzle game a wannabe virtual jigsaw, but it does adhere to many of the same rules. It’s also blended with the ancient Japanese table game, tangrams, with a dash of Tetris thrown in for good measure.

You’re presented with a silhouette in the centre of the screen and 12 different geometric shapes surrounding it. These shapes are where the Tetris likeness comes from, as they’re all built up of five squares arranged into different patterns (otherwise, that’s about as close as it comes to the classic block-building game).

No two these geometric shapes are the same: you have a right angle, a ‘T’, a plus symbol, an ‘L’ and so forth. They're all coloured to help you keep a close eye on their unique patterns when they’re jumbled up together in the middle.

Your task is to fit these pieces into the silhouette by moving, rotating, and flipping them until they fit snugly together. Not every level necessarily requires you to use every piece, however, which can make even the simplest puzzles quite challenging if you struggle to suss out exactly which shapes you need.

In later levels (of which there are a whopping 153) putting together a full, 12 piece puzzle can be immensely difficult, to the point at which it’d be easy to give up with the game completely. Fortunately, a hint system saves the day. By tapping the screen twice, you’re shown the position of two, sometimes three, of the shapes within the puzzle.

It might feel a little like cheating at first, but in fact these hints are not unlike the random numbers or letters you’d expect to find in a new sudoku puzzle or crossword. By giving yourself that first piece or two, the remainder of the puzzle is still immensely challenging, yet far more attainable.

Zentomino also keeps track of your progress in each individual level, so you can quit a game half way through to go onto the next puzzle, and then return to your previous game whenever you feel like it.

The graphics really don’t need to be very fancy in a game like this, so it’s good to see Zentomino has been kept attractive, yet clean and uncluttered.

This is another small part of its well-considered design that, altogether, builds up to make Zentomino a beautifully polished and escapist puzzler. If you’re looking for a bit of an ambling way to pass the time at the bus stop or during work hours, this could be just the thing.