App Army Assemble: Silent Dot - "Is this minamilist puzzler worth shouting about?"

Silent Dot is a minimalist puzzler from indie developer Sander Vanhove that draws inspiration from Barte Bonte's colour series and Studio Waterzooi's Please Touch the Artwork. It promises to provide a simple but engaging puzzling experience, so we handed the game to our App Army to see if they thought it delivered.

Here's what they said:

Mike Lisagor

Silent Dot is a rather simple, straightforward puzzler that has you getting a dot to the finish in the fewest moves possible. If you do, you earn a star but the game doesn’t tell you the number of moves necessary to get that star. That is one of my gripes with the game. You have to do trial and error. Other than that, the game is ok and I breezed through about 90 levels and decided to take a break. Nice game for short bursts of time, but nothing special. I have not seen a new mechanic introduced which makes the game sort of boring after a while.

Eduard Pandele

Silent Dot is a beautiful minimalist abstract puzzler where you must traverse a hexagonal maze. Each move you make changes the state of most maze cells - that is, turns their floors on or off. Needless to say, you don't want to go into a cell whose floor will disappear on your next move, so you need to carefully count your steps. And... that's it. There's a single gameplay mechanic at work here, which is interesting at first, but (as with all the purely logic-based puzzles) it soon gets a little boring as you reach your own intellectual limit (also, who knew counting CAN get boring, huh?).

Another problem is that easy and medium puzzles are very simple, actually, because they almost always reduce to "dilly dally around until you can pass through the last couple maze cells" and then the difficulty skyrockets in hard mode, where oftentimes there's a single path to victory and every misstep sends you back to cell one, with all the frustration that entails. It might seem like a negative review, but I actually had fun with this game and I think it's worth the $2 (yup, it's a premium game with no ads, a rarity these days). So if you like abstract puzzles, give this a shot.

Mark Abukoff

It took me a while to figure out the secret to this game, but once I did I sailed through most levels with little difficulty. In ways this is very much like a bunch of other similar games. Find a way to get through to the end of the level. Or try again. Or reset your progress on the level. Truth is, I don’t play many of this type of game because they’re more alike than different, and so the attraction wears off quickly for me. It does remind me vaguely of some of the “Go” stealth/tactical games where you have to find a way through a level while avoiding guards and cameras. I liked that aspect of this game.

What I didn’t like was that I had to find a YouTube video to show how to safely pass through each cell without getting sent back to the beginning. In my opinion, you shouldn’t have to do that. Not early in the game. A quick and simple tutorial could have eliminated that bit of early (if brief) frustration. But that’s not a dealbreaker. Overall I thought it was an interesting game and if you Iike games like this, it’s worth the inexpensive purchase.

Torbjörn Kämblad

Silent Dot is a streamlined mellow puzzler where you basically have to move a dot into a triangle. The levels challenge you by introducing different obstacles that have to be traversed to reach the end. Initially, the difficulty is low, but it soon ramps up with no tutorial. I had to get into quite a bit of trial and error to get past the obstacles and quite a lot of backtracking with my dot to get past. As mellow puzzlers go it I a quite nice experience playing Silent Dot. The presentation is sleek with relaxing music. I have however seen, and played this kind of game before, many times. There is little to nothing special or innovative making it hard to recommend.

Robert Maines

Silent Dot is a rather charming puzzler where you guide your dot across a field of hexagons to reach a triangle in the fewest moves possible. You can only move one hexagon at a time and things start off very simple. The difficulty soon ramps up with revolving hexagons that open and close hexagons to your dot. Land on a closed hexagon and you are sent back to the beginning of the level. Graphics are simple, music is chilled and there are 180 levels over three stages of difficulty. Some instructions would have been nice, as it can be frustrating trying to work out what you need to do. Still, it’s a keeper for me.

Oksana Ryan

There isn’t a lot to this game but it is enjoyable to play. The graphics and sound are simple and the gameplay straightforward - moving the dot to the triangle without falling through the highlighted blocks. I didn’t find a tutorial and it took me a couple of levels to get into the rhythm of the game, but once I did it was plain sailing through the levels. I found it a good game in small doses and returned to it when I had ten minutes to spare. It’s not a game that offers anything revolutionary but it’s a steady game that has enough challenge to keep me happy.

Pierpaolo Morgante

Silent Dot is a puzzle game whose goal is to guide a little ball towards the end of the level, represented by a tile with a triangle. The levels are organized by difficulty, roughly sixty in easy, medium and hard. The game is very simple, and one picks up the rules very quickly, maybe in the first five levels. The challenging part is that the tiles switch continuously between solid and transparent, and if you get stuck on one of them while the floor is not there, the level starts again.

The concept of the game is simple yet captivating. The difficulty ramps up so that the last levels of the easy difficulty prepare the player for the first levels of medium. As of now, I played around 100 levels, and I tried some of the hard ones. Another strong point of the game is the graphics, simple yet very polished. The music is relaxing, and it is enjoyable to listen to. Maybe the only drawback of the game is that it becomes a little repetitive (somewhat boring, perhaps?) but it is definitely worth the price.

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