Premium puzzle games made in India are rare, as this is a market where free-to-play rules. The last one we came across was Socioball. Pune-based Dropout Games' puzzle game Blyss also took the premium route, and naturally we wanted to check it out.
When we first fired up Blyss, we were very impressed. The art is wonderful and the relaxing music adds a lot to the game. The game has different themes, which you can activate simply by solving puzzles and earning in-game currency. This is a premium game with no in-app purchases, so solving puzzles is the only way to unlock themes. All the themes look great, and we just felt good when we unlocked them after solving puzzles.
The basic game mechanics are solid. You see a random grid of tiles with one dot each. If you swipe across three or four tiles to make L-, O-, or I-shapes, the dots disappear. Clear all the dots in every level to progress. The challenge increases when certain tiles with two or three dots appear later in the game. These need to be chained to other tiles two and three times respectively to clear the dots. It has certain combos too. You can clear tiles with an L-O-L combo, or an I-I-I combo for a neat bonus score.
The game starts with its Endless mode, where you just keep clearing puzzles until you fail. When you fail the first time, you can use one coin to continue playing. Fail again and you can use three coins. After this the number of coins needed to continue after failure increases to 31, 63, 127, and so on.
Blyss has two more game modes - Playground and Time Attack. Playground is where you can test your skills in puzzles with of various difficulty levels and Time Attack is where you try to solve puzzles before the timer runs out. These modes can be unlocked after you solve 400 and 500 puzzles respectively. While all of this sounds good, Blyss lacks one crucial feature - the ability to save games.
Suppose you solve a few puzzles in Endless mode, then hit the home button, and return to the game after an hour - all your progress is gone. Every game these days has a Continue button that lets you resume the game from where you left it. Not having this feature is an very, very big miss. Twice we reached level 25 and returned to the game after an hour, only to find our progress gone. Once we ran out of battery while playing the game. Again, we lost 30 levels of progress.
We raised the issue with the developers and they said they're working on adding this feature. Once, we also encountered a bug where the tiles got stuck to each other, making it hard to solve puzzles. Starting a new game fixed the issue.
The game rewards you for achievements such as pulling off three combos in one level. This is a good addition but the problem is that these achievements don't register until you fail to solve a puzzle. These should ideally be registered the moment you pull it off, as opposed to waiting till the game ends. Needless to say, if you hit the home button and return to the game after some time, achievements from the current session don't register either.
The game has a super I-I-I-I combo (four tiles in a straight line, swiped four times consecutively), which didn't trigger during our testing. We managed this combo at least thrice, but our in-game stats show 0 super I combos. There are some design inconsistencies in the game too. It uses a font with a thin weight to describe your objectives and in the credits section. Some of these are in a larger font size, and others in a smaller font size. Trimming a word or two would allow developers to maintain the same font size throughout.
We really wanted to like Blyss but these issues made us feel more like beta testers than a player. It's hard to understand how the developers shipped a game without a feature as basic as saving your progress. While the music, and art are great, and making people solve puzzles to unlock in-game features is an excellent idea, it's hard to overlook the lack of save slots in the game.
Blyss is available on the App Store at Rs. 120.
ProsOverall rating (out of 10): 5
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