A new, simple, yet highly original puzzle game for your browser? It must be the newest release from Tonypa! I keeping expecting that the well that is Tonypa's prodigious enigmatological imagination must eventually run dry, but Bripitol, a sort of deliberately-paced matching game, continues the master puzzle designer's run of designs for games that are simple, easy to grasp, yet unique and compelling.
The goal of Bripitol is to click on symbols to make them disappear. You can click on a symbol if there is a matching symbol to the left or right, or above or below, and there is no non-matching symbol in between. This clears the symbol and all its matching orthogonal neighbors. Keep finding and clearing matches to advance the game. There are three modes of play: Level mode has you clear a certain number of matches before advancing to the next level, Rush has you score as high as you can in two minutes, and Clear has you leave as few symbols behind as possible before finishing a level.
In all modes of play, the key is to make sure that you have enough matching symbols available to clear a set. This requires a little more care and premeditation than many similar games, which is a large part of what makes Bripitol unique. Unfortunately, once you get the hang of it, the shallow difficulty curve means that Bripitol is a little more repetitive than it could be if it became a little more challenging more quickly. Still, it remains a fun, thoughtful experience, perfect for small breaks in your day. With appealing abstract design and a cool, though oddly creepy, soundtrack from Kevin Macleod, Bripitol is a fine edition to Tonypa's library of puzzlers.
I would like to like this better... good simple idea, soft music, fine graphics etc. Practically everything I like.
Maybe it is the lack of challenge...
Yeah, I agree. It's a decent enough concept, but the challenge just isn't there. Rather than the arcade-style gameplay it has now, it would probably be better as a series of puzzles where the objective is to clear the whole grid, and there is a unique solution.
Of course, given the low revenue most Flash games make, it wouldn't be worth the dev's time to design enough puzzles by hand... but it seems like if you kept the grid size small enough, the decision tree would branch in a sufficiently limited way that with some clever coding you could generate puzzles procedurally, starting with an empty grid and working backwards, testing at each step that the balls you're adding still leave only one solution.
I love Tonypa games! Short and sweet, no-brain time waster or intense, multi-layer logic puzzle. Every one of his games can be played at whatever level suits my mood. 1-key shortcut: enabled!
Haven't even played the game yet, but wanted to say that when I saw "Kevin Macleod" I got all excited. I love his music and use a lot of his scores in my own work. Nice to see others have discovered his stuff too.
I like Clean Mode a lot!
Now that I've played... nice game. The music adds to it, and it's quite possibly the weirdest (but good) matching game I've ever played.
@flip;
Haha, me too! I'm not a creative developer, but I love to listen to his music even if it's just the copyright-free stuff he has on his website.
If you're a Macleod junkie too, you might be able to tell me-exactly what piece is that playing in this game? I really want to download it, it's so ethereal and creepy... ♥
I am definitely a huge fan of Tonypa, but, like Reiner Knizia, sometimes you just bomb. This one is SO boring to me, and the "strategy", what there is of it, seems so obvious. Was it just too easy? or too long before the challenge appeared? Eh, it happens on occasion.
i was glad to have a non-sadistic tonypa game to play
On the second game, I came up with a pretty much no-lose strategy:
Don't eliminate balls unless it's toward taking out a row or column. If you have four in a row, be careful to take them out two at a time, instead of three then get stuck with one.
Love this guy's games, but this one needs work.
Thanks for the review and nice comments :)
xopods, about generating solvable puzzle levels by going backward. I tried that, have a version which generates levels exactly that way. But it did not end up with interesting levels so I decided to randomly fill up the board in clean mode. It is a bit about luck now, sometimes you can clean it all and sometimes not.
asfghn, the music is from "Ghostpocalypse" series. Use that as keyword to search Kevin Macleod collection. I used parts 4 and 8 only.
tony pa is a god
The interface is so sparse, there's no option to abort a game in progress and return to the main menu.
Another observation; in the "Clean" mode of the game, the random setup of the board can occasionally make it impossible to clear. This happens if there is a circle on the board that is the only one of its color in its row and column. It seems a bit unfair to penalize the player for not clearing what cannot be removed by design.
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