Reviewed on: iPhone 6S
Also available on: iOS Devices
Developer: FLEB
Publisher: FLEB LLC
Currently, the mobile gaming market is saturated with free-to-play titles that don’t offer a full experience unless customers pay for it. Suddenly, along comes a title that reminds everyone that simplicity is king. RYB, FLEB LLC’s latest app, is a beautiful, logic-based puzzle game that embraces a minimalist concept in every way imaginable. Through its simple — yet intuitive — UI, literally anyone can pick up and play this interesting title. Truthfully, that’s the defining aspect of RYB: it doesn’t fall victim to language barriers, because the entire game consists of simple geometric shapes. This is one of the very few apps (or games for that matter) that actually respects human intelligence. RYB is the epitome of puzzle-centric game design.
When you boot up RYB, the first thing you’ll notice is a giant black hexagon on your screen, which acts as a hub. It’s segmented into seven sections, and each of them is a “world”, per se. Within the selected world is a collection of levels that contain multiple puzzles to solve. When you complete the puzzles for a level’s section, it fills up with color, subtly notifying the player that they have completed that part. When all of the levels are complete for that world, the entire shape is filled with color; a segmented piece of the hexagon is colored in, and a new world opens up. The rest of the game follows this pattern, but the puzzles become progressively more complex.
It’s widely understood that the satisfaction of the puzzle comes from the puzzle itself. A good puzzle has all of the pieces in front of you, and you only have yourself to blame for not solving it sooner. To accentuate this, RYB features a minimalist motif that cues the player with simple shapes, logic, and colors. The goal is to fill in the puzzle’s shapes with the appropriate color (red, yellow, or blue). Since the game doesn’t give any directions, it’s up to the player’s wit to solve the problem.
Each puzzle offers three tries before the puzzle is reset. The black shapes occasionally have a colored dot in them, which is a clue for what appropriate color should be filled in for that shape, or an adjacent one. RYB is not unlike Minesweeper in this sense. The very first puzzle is a great example of this. It’s a triforce shaped puzzle. The central triangle is yellow with three red dots, and the three adjacent triangles are black with a yellow dot. The yellow dots are a hint that the adjacent shape should be yellow, and the three red dots in the central triangle hint that three outside triangles should be red. Therefore, logic dictates that the central triangle is yellow, and the other triangles are red. Puzzle solved.
As I mentioned earlier, the puzzles become progressively more difficult, especially when new colors are added to the palette. The “orange world” is the first segment where the players’ wits will be truly tested. Not only are there four colors to work with (red, blue, yellow, and orange), but the puzzles have more shapes to fill in, which further increases the margin of error. To balance this, all puzzles have counters on the side to hint how many shapes should have the appropriate color; for example, a complex parallelogram may have six red dots, three yellow dots, and one orange dot. RYB becomes even more complex when purple and green colors are added, totaling six colors by the end of the game. One of last puzzles is a doozy; it’s essentially the shape of Bowser’s shell, and it has 14 shapes to color in.
RYB’s simplicity is its strongest aspect, and it’s easy to see why. From a developmental perspective, FLEB LLC successfully managed to craft engaging puzzles without making them too difficult to understand. Every puzzle is unique, and there’s only one way to solve them. RYB could’ve easily monetized hints through microtransactions, but thankfully it doesn’t. It’s rare to see a puzzle app that isn’t manipulative through in-app purchases or forced video ads in the current mobile gaming market. That alone makes this wonderful little app stand out from the crowd. As I mentioned earlier, RYB is language independent, so anyone from Shanghai to Santiago can be an expert puzzle solver. For two bucks, RYB is a no brainer, and should be a mainstay on any iOS device.
This game’s review copy was a digital download code provided by the publisher.
G4@Syfygames
10/10
A puzzle worth solving.
RYB’s simplistic design and engaging puzzles are worth the two dollars. I can say with absolute confidence that this is the best puzzle app of 2016 so far, bar none.
The Longform Vault 