No guessing allowed: how we design every Hex Sense level to be solvable
We already mentioned in some of our blog posts that we really liked the Minesweeper puzzle game. We played it a lot and it is one of the games that inspired Hex Sense in the first place. But there was often one thing I didn’t like about it - sometimes you reach the moment where you have to guess.
I remember how I always postponed this moment. I was solving everything around it in the field, opening every tile I could prove was safe until in the very end I was left with a 50/50 guess about where the bomb was. And that was so frustrating. Because I had spent so much time solving everything else with pure logic and then the game result was just hanging on a “coin flip” result. And if I lost like that, it didn’t feel like my mistake, it just felt unfair.
So when we were designing Hex Sense, we made one rule for ourselves from the very beginning: it should be like a minesweeper game, but no guessing. Every level in Hex Sense has a solution that you can reach without guessing even once. The numbers on the open tiles in combination with the link symbols always give you enough information to work out which tiles are safe and you can always guide Mochi to the exit by pure logic. If you are stuck, it means there is a clue on the board you haven’t noticed yet. And finding that missing clue is one of the best moments in the game for me.
This is one of my favourite levels. Can you figure out the way forward?
For us a puzzle feels fair when winning depends on your own thinking and when you fail you can see why. That is exactly the feeling we want in Hex Sense and we think we have successfully achieved it. If Mochi steps on deadly hazards, it should always be because you misread a clue, not because you were unlucky. And when you trust the game like that, you want to try and replay the level again instead of just closing it.
At some point we even asked ourselves if a little uncertainty could make the game more interesting, but when we remember that 50/50 feeling from Minesweeper, the answer feels clear to us - the frustration is not worth it.
But we made one exception. In one single level out of all the Hex Sense levels there is one place where you need to guess - but only if you want to open all the tiles. Reaching the exit still requires no guessing at all, so the main rule is still true. That one guess is only there for the players who like to open the whole field completely.
I kind of like this exception, because it is kind of an Easter egg. Maybe not that many people will try to open the whole field on every level, but I think it is cool that somewhere out there this one strange spot exists. If you find it, you will know it is the one.
Like we mentioned in a previous blog post about the game, we were not yet able to achieve our no-guessing rule in the Daily Challenge, but we will!
What about you - do you enjoy a little bit of guessing in puzzle games, or do you want pure logic all the way? Tell us in our Discord server. And if you want to feel how a minesweeper with no guessing plays, Hex Sense is free and you can play it right in your browser.
Written by
Ana