Game Reviews

Huerons

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| Huerons
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Huerons
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| Huerons

What is a Hueron? That's easy.

It's a little purple dot, which gets drawn in and paired up with another Hueron whenever your finger is placed in the empty grid space between them. But not diagonally. Unless those Huerons are positioned diagonally themselves. Then you can put your finger...

Hmm, maybe it's not so easy to explain after all.

Rule of thumb

Huerons is an apparently simple logic puzzler that looks far easier to play than it actually is. And that's a fatal problem.

Any casual puzzler like this, with its inherently abstract structure, needs a clear set of rules that can be grasped intuitively. After a brief initial learning period, all of the figuring out should be done in relation to the puzzles themselves.

Huerons didn't work like that for me. I still couldn't quite get a full grasp of how it wanted me to play after half an hour.

I understood the controls, the mechanics, and the basic principles. I'm not a complete dummy (honest). But that moment, typically quite early on, where basic patterns and routines lay a foundation in your brain's pathways - that didn't happen.

Rights and Huerons

At its heart, Huerons is just a bit dull and formless. You have to pull together successive pairs and clusters of Huerons until you have only one Hueron left, at which point you're awarded a score, which is irritatingly time-based. Then you progress to the next level.

In its favour, I did appreciate the fact that there were multiple ways to solve many of the puzzles, and that the hint system highlighted that fact in successive tries.

But once you're out of these oh-so-necessary hints, you have to pay for more - and a meagre amount you get, too.

There are also additional elements that get brought into play, such as wild cards and Hueron-obliterating black holes. But they sound a lot more interesting than they actually are.

Huerons is a functionally adequate puzzler that suffers from a sterile, somewhat woolly, and just plain boring premise. That's really all the explanation you need.

Huerons

A proficiently executed puzzler that's too vague and drab to ever really imprint itself on your brain
Score
Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.