Happy new years! I’m aiming to write a new post every Friday about my trial runs through various games this year. I may miss some depending on how busy I get, but I’ll do my best to keep regular updates.

While I was working on a prototype to enter for an educational mobile game contest, I was interested in Cogs but didn’t really understand how it worked. I knew it was a puzzle game and was sort of steampunkish with the gears (cogs, duh), but beyond that I was really just enamored by the aesthetics. I finally downloaded the game and gave it a trial run.

I would be lying if I said I gave it a typical one-week trial as it has been sitting on my computer for a good few months. I haven’t been doing these reviews in order at all. Nonetheless, the distance and random short session of play is what is becoming my typical approach to puzzle-type games because each puzzle can be a session in itself.

Cogs is a sliding puzzle game that sometimes has 3D elements. The model that the game uses is all in 3D which makes for an interesting aesthetic. The word “quaint” also comes to mind, but perhaps not in the dictionary definition. Think something more Victorian London, add a bit of oil and soot, and be a little romantic about it. That said, I actually like sliding puzzle games. It’s strange, but I have this knack of sliding pieces and eventually (keyword, here) getting the numbers in the right order. My earliest memory of a sliding puzzle is actually back in 1st grade when we had computer class. There was a game for the Mac computers, which I unfortunately don’t remember now, involving a castle and a bunch of puzzles in order to progress through it. One of the first ones was a sliding puzzle and I always took the branch to solve it.

So, Cogs should have resonated with me, but oddly it was a game that I lost interest in the most quickly. Unlike traditional puzzle games where you move numbers in order, your tiles are now pipes or gears that must create a line in some way to connect one end to another. There are multiple solutions and two additional challenges per puzzle is to solve it within a certain amount of time and in the least amount of moves. Also unlike traditional sliding games where you can only shove the tile closest to the empty space, you can shove a row or column into the empty space, saving at least one move. This change was one I never grew accustomed to (also because I didn’t play for too long), being used to the rule of sliding adjacent tiles.

Each puzzle stage has a different objective. Sometimes it’s to direct the flow of air into a balloon. Upon completion, the balloon fills up and takes the puzzle with it. A fitting aesthetic and makes it a bit more rewarding. Sometimes you have to synchronize a clock or make a gear rotate. 3D puzzles include cubes where gears have to be rotated or a puzzle sort of like “two sides of a coin” where you literally flip the puzzle stage because the tiles have a back side that may not match the front side. These are all creative puzzles and good if you are in the mood. I guess I wasn’t really in the mood.

Or maybe it was the little tings and the infuriating innocent-sounding music. The tings are alerts telling you your time goal has passed or you have surpassed your move count goals. It took me a little while to realize this because I was focused on the puzzle itself. The symbols used for the time and move count is sort of like a game in itself because it wasn’t immediately clear to me what it meant. Thinking back on it now, I’m sure I would give the wrong guess, so I won’t bother. The main point is, my attention wasn’t focused on that part of the screen and my primary goal for a first play through is to solve the puzzle first.

I’m not trying or intending to be harsh. Cogs is a nice game if you are in the mood for solving puzzles and exercising your mind a little bit. However, I don’t really feel compelled to want to finish the game despite its interesting adaption of a sliding puzzle. If you’d really like to know, I started Cogs before Scoregasm and I have written about two additional games before getting around to this one (and have played a few other games besides). Cogs is a quaint game. The aesthetics are tight, the music can be a little cheesy and overly sweet, the puzzles match the theme quite well but perhaps it wasn’t a game for me. That doesn’t meant it might not be a game for you – you may find it’s your favorite game this month.