Glow Artisan

I’m the sort of the person who likes to do several things at once. During a normal day, I can have anything from two to eight documents all open on my screen. I flicker between them like a moth.

So Glow Artisan has my number straight away. It’s a game that requires you to think multiple moves ahead but with an understanding of how these moves fit together in the grand scheme of things. You can't just flit about willy-nilly.

Glow Artisan is a puzzler that tasks you with recreating an image made up of coloured blocks in as few moves as possible.

At your disposal are the traditional Red, Blue, and Yellow colours, and an eraser for removing errant blocks.

A colour can only be applied by sweeping your finger across from either the left-hand side or the top of the grid. Naturally, most grid patterns involve bits of colour all over the place, so judicious use of the eraser (which counts as a move) is required.

Making things ever-so-slightly more complicated is the fact that the colours blend, so drawing a yellow block on top of a blue creates a green one.

The trick is to work out exactly which order (and where) to apply the colours and when to deploy the eraser. There’s not much of a punishment for getting it wrong, though, as you can undo any move an unlimited amount of times and not be penalised for it.

The difficulty is just about perfectly pitched, with the gold medal requirements requiring a perfect solution, and the bronze easily attainable by bundling through.

As the results are linked into online leaderboards that are shown on the level select screen, you’ll almost certainly want to aim for gold, if only to remove your smug mate’s avatar from the top of the screen.

Although it shouldn’t take too long to complete all 150 puzzles to a certain degree of competency, Glow Artisan does do its best to keep you coming back by way of time challenges and random puzzles.

The time challenges should be a walk in the park considering you won’t have to actually think about the solution any more (in theory), but the medal criteria are so tight that it ends up being just as hard to attain the gold medal.

The Randomiser, on the other hand, adds a bit more value to the package, creating puzzles for you to solve based on number of moves and size of grid. There’s also the option of creating your own puzzles either manually or based on images from your photo library.

Glow Artisan is a puzzler that rewards foresight and thought over guessiwork and luck. It may not be the most attractive title available from the Zune Marketplace, but it will most likely be the one you’ll return to.