HexiHashi

HexiHashi is one of those logic puzzle games that have extremely simple rules but which take substantially longer to master. It’s a game about creating connections between several hexagon tiles, each of them with a specific requirement in terms of how many links it should have, and with the restriction that each edge can have 0, 1 or 2 connections. Unlike other similar games, this is not a “find the developer’s solution” game, since the levels can have multiple solutions.

Initially, you can only play in “Free Mode” which allows completing levels of 3 different categories: Easy, Medium and Hard, with the complexity aspect being given by the amount of hexes that you need to link and by the grid size. These are all randomly generated and while one easy level usually takes around 1 minute to solve, the hard ones could take even 5 minutes or more. Completing a level will award some XP (varies depending on the difficulty) and when you have gathered enough XP to reach player rank 10, 15 and 20 you can unlock 3 new modes, respectively: Time Attack (completing levels in a limited time, with the remaining time being allocated to the next level), Move Master (completing levels with a limited amount of moves) and Endless (no time / moves restriction, just solving levels back to back). Unfortunately, these game modes have mixed difficulty levels, so it’s quite easy to get stuck very fast in Time Attack, while in Move Master you most likely need to solve the level off-screen in order to conserve your moves.

HexiHashi is a game with a very slow progression – the levels award quite little XP and in order to reach level 30 for example (to unlock all games modes possible) you need to solve according to my calculations more than 100 hard levels (or 3 times as much easy levels) – which takes a considerable amount of time. If you are an achievement hunter, then going for a 100% completion will require you a lot of patience and time investment, especially since you will need to reach stage 60 in every game mode and overall complete 1200 levels. On the bright side, there’s an in-game hint system that you can use 3 times per level in order to check the correctness of the links you placed: the hint will show you the solution for 1 second, overlapping your already placed links.

Considering the high degree of replayability, $3 is a pretty sweet price for the amount of hours that you can spend in it – that is, if you think that this particular puzzle type is your kind of thing. If you’re an achievement hunter, prepare for a very long grind for that satisfying 100%, something between 20h and 60h depending on how thoroughly you want to play the levels.