Pocico

Pocico is a minimalist abstract puzzle game.

Some games can’t be assigned to a certain time or era – they might have been developed in the early years of the medium or only recently, and still seem so futuristic that they could be easily used as a prop when a video game happens to be depicted in an science-fiction movie. Pocico belongs to this category: Located in the perfect spot between minimalism and aesthetic, looking like a abstract or concrete painting that came to life, and its pentatonic scaled sound effects and reluctant, for the most time invisible user interface are a perfect fit.

The games principle is reminiscent of „Lights Out“: The levels in Pocico consist of a number of differently colored shapes – some of these are filled with another shape in another color. Clicking a shape changes this state („filled“ or „empty“) for various shapes in the level by rules different from level to level and to the background color of the clicked shape – while the behavior on the easiest difficulty (where two different colors are active) seems sometimes identical to „Lights Out“ (where the pressed and all neighboring squares are switched), it is sometimes even then completely different – according to the developer, individual rules apply for every level. Higher difficulties, were more colors come into play follow an unique, hard to penetrate logic. But as in „Lights Out“, all shapes in the level have to be switched to empty/off.

A interesting thing (that is also present in the much simpler „Lights Out“, but never occurred to me) is the affinity to Conways Game of Life: Changing cells might create „spawns“ that you need to manage to win – thanks to the unregular structure in this game, this is quite a task to wrap your head around. With my approach of trying it with a combination of intuition worked quite well up until level 8 of 12 (the puzzle depicted above) – on the lowest difficulty setting; eventually, I figured it out – I’m not sure if I will make it any further, but it is a very enjoyable challenge up until now. Increasing the number of active colors makes the game quite hard even earlier, and on the highest difficulty where nine colors are active, I fail to solve the very first puzzle.

Whetever you are a casual puzzle player or an hard boiled enthusiast – Pocico will offer you a good time with its witty, deep gameplay and its great style. The game is released under a GPL3 license; worked fine under OpenSuse Leap using Wine.