Heyawake by Nikoli

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local Wireless)

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Review:

The name Nikoli may not mean much to American gamers, but the company has had a massive impact on the world of Puzzle games. Founded in 1980, Nikoli is a Japanese magazine publisher, and they have made a name for themselves for popularizing a wide variety of logic puzzles. The most noteworthy of these is undoubtedly sudoku, which Nikoli helped to flourish in popularity in Japan, which then in turn spread worldwide. However, the company has published dozens of different types of puzzles, many of which have become popular in their own right as well, such as Numberlink.

As a result of this powerful impact the company has had on the world of Puzzle games, numerous Puzzle game releases on the PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo Switch bear Nikoli’s name. Heyawake by Nikoli, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2012, is an $8 release that has players tackling 50 puzzles of various difficulty levels in a style of game that is fairly different from Sudoku, but still has players working through logic and process-of-elimination.

For those unfamiliar with Heyawake (pronounced “hey-ah-wah-kay”, because Japanese is phonetic), the premise here is that players are presented with a grid that has been sectioned off into rectangular “rooms”, and they must paint the cels within those rooms in a way that obeys the following four rules:

1. Each room containing a number must have exactly that number of cels painted. Rooms without numbers can have any number of cels painted or unpainted, but they must follow the other rules.
2. Every cel adjacent to a painted cel must remain unpainted.
3. No horizontal or vertical line of unpainted cels may go into more than two rooms.
4. All unpainted cels must be contiguous once the puzzle is completed. In other words, unpainted cels must not be sectioned off from the rest of the puzzle by the painted cels.

It takes a bit of time to get used to these rules, but once you do you find this is quite an original and ingenious puzzle design. That has you staring at the puzzle and trying to see where one of the four rules means that a cel must be painted or unpainted.

The game’s “tutorial” (really just a series of instructional pages) provides a few examples to get you thinking in the right direction. If you see a 2×2 room in the corner bearing the number 2, you know that the painted cels will always be the one in the corner and the one diagonal to it. To do otherwise would run afoul of rules 1, 2, or 4. Likewise, a 3×3 room bearing the number 5 will always be in a starburst pattern, for much the same reason. As you play the game, you tend to make it a habit to look out for common situations like this, as they’re the easiest to fill out once you know to look for them.

Unlike Sudoku, this game doesn’t have you using different numbers in cels – they can either be painted, marked as unpainted, or clear, that’s it. As such, the controls are simpler, and the game doesn’t suffer from the control issues that Nikoli’s version of Sudoku has, nor have much of a problem with marking cels with “notes”. Rather, this is just good Puzzle gameplay, without caveats.

However, there are still flaws in the features and presentation to contend with.

All of this game’s puzzles are presented with simple, clean visuals on the bottom screen, with a top screen showing a completely-unnecessary zoomed-in view of the puzzle. This is decent enough, but terribly bland. However, making things worse is the game’s soundtrack, which plays extremely repetitive music that becomes very annoying very quickly.

As mentioned above, this game can’t even be bothered to provide players with an interactive tutorial, instead only offering a non-interactive “tutorial” that explains the rules and basic strategies of the game but doesn’t really work to ensure that players understand those rules. There is at the very least a 4-player competitive mode here, but I’m not sure how many people have a lot of friends who want to play competitive logic puzzles together.

There is one other thing to mention here that strikes me as somewhat odd. Unlike the other games in the Nikoli series, Heyawake inexplicably costs $8 compared to the others’ $5. I’m not quite sure why this is – it has the same number of puzzles.

In the end, Heyawake by Nikoli is a decent Puzzle game that doesn’t suffer from the issues of many of the other games in this series simply because the mechanics of the Puzzle don’t call for complex controls. In fact, this is one of my favorite games in the series, which makes it all the more frustrating that it is comparatively overpriced, being $8 for 50 puzzles. I would still argue that this is a good pickup for Puzzle fans, though not a spectacular one, with the presentation and lacking features still holding it back some.

tl;dr – Heyawake by Nikoli is a Puzzle game where players must paint cels inside rooms on a grid while following four rules. This is a one of the best games in this series, though its higher price compared to the others ($8 for 50 puzzles) keeps it from being a clear favorite among the others. And like the other games in the series, it’s held back by a poor presentation and lacking features. Still, fans of logic puzzles may want to give this one a try.

Grade: B-

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