Sudoku Master

Genre: Sudoku Puzzle

Players: 1

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: Pix Arts

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Review:

Sudoku Master is a Sudoku game released as an asset on the Unity Asset Store in 2020 as Sudoku Classic Puzzle Game, and brought to the Nintendo Switch as a low-effort asset flip in 2021. This game can only be played in portable mode using the touchscreen. Rather than having a selection of pre-designed puzzles, Sudoku Master randomly generates a puzzle at the difficulty level of your choosing, making for a potentially infinite number of puzzles to play.

The presentation here is pretty sparse. Players can choose between a light and dark theme, each featuring flat colors, and this is backed by a single slightly annoying plunky song, and that’s it. There’s not much to look at or listen to here, and what’s on offer isn’t very impressive.

However, that’s not the only problem with the visuals. The actual Sudoku puzzle only takes up roughly 1/4 of the screen, which is absolutely absurd when you consider that the game places buttons below the screen and then leaves a lot of empty space at the sides of the screen where those buttons could have been placed instead, allowing for the puzzle itself to be enlarged. This is doubly problematic – it makes the puzzle harder to see, and it makes the on-screen buttons so tiny that it’s more difficult to press them.

This is made even more infuriating by this game’s insistence on being played in portable mode – the game’s creator must have known players would be forced to use the tiny screen, and then made the puzzle unnecessarily small despite that fact. The tiny numbers on my screen are already hard enough for me to see, I can’t imagine how this game must play for someone who primarily uses a Nintendo Switch Lite. And of course, that’s not even getting into the game’s lack of a vertical mode (again, since this game doesn’t even use any of the Nintendo Switch’s buttons or analog sticks).

Beyond this, the core gameplay works pretty well here. The touchscreen works well, players have an option whether or not to be told if they make a mistake, and they also have the option to turn on or off automatically clearing notes when a number is entered that invalidates them.

I really wish more thought had been put into this game’s presentation, because it gets the actual gameplay of Sudoku right… at least if you’re only wanting to play in portable mode using the touchscreen. For $3, I can see this being a decent Sudoku game for players with tiny fingers and really good eyesight who don’t mind the tiny text. But for most, the requirement to play in handheld mode and the ridiculous choice to make the sudoku puzzles smaller than they needed to be is going to make even that $3 price tag not worth it.

tl;dr – Sudoku Master is a $3 Sudoku Puzzle game with randomly-generated puzzles making for potentially infinite gameplay to occupy your time on the Nintendo Switch. Unfortunately, this great value is severely hampered by the game only being playable in handheld mode, and a terrible presentation that makes the puzzles themselves even smaller than they need to be, with teenie-tiny text and minuscule on-screen buttons. If you have sharp eyes, tiny fingers, and a desire to only play in handheld mode, this version of Sudoku may entice you, but otherwise its flaws are far too severe to make it worth even its low price.

Grade: C-

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