Yugo Puzzle

Yugo Puzzle is a grid-based puzzle game about joining colorful bouncy jellies in a stripped-back, abstract world. You drag jelly blocks around using your cursor in an attempt to join same-colored jellies together. The game might appear simple, but it pulls no punches with the difficulty of its tightly constructed, deeply elegant conundrums.

In each level of Yugo Puzzle, you’re presented with various jellies of different colors. You then solve the level by clicking on jellies and dragging them, causing them to hop either to the left or to the right, and falling if unsupported. Jellies of different colors won’t merge, but as soon as two jellies of the same color come in contact, they instantly merge together. The level is only solved once all jellies of the same color have merged with each other in this way.

In all these regards the game is identical to Jelly No Puzzle, a previous game from Qrostar, and could be considered a spiritual successor to it. However there’s one key wrinkle that Yugo Puzzle introduces: the jellies hop when they’re moved, which isn’t just a cute animation—it affects where they’re able to go, and even allows them to climb shallow stairs.

The puzzles in Yugo Puzzle will put your spatial reasoning to the test, exploring all the possible nuances of the game’s seemingly simple rules. They’re all designed to be as elegant as possible, with absolutely no components that aren’t relevant to the solution. Yet despite this elegance, the puzzles are still often very challenging, even from the very first level. They’re often constructed in such a way as to appear totally impossible until everything clicks with a sudden “eureka” moment.

To prevent the game from becoming overly frustrating, you’re always able to tackle multiple puzzles at a time, so if you get stuck on one you can try another. The game also has a fairly robust hint system, where hints show small images of parts of the solution to nudge you in the right direction without showing every single step.

Yugo Puzzle has no story or non-puzzle elements whatsoever, unless you count a few charming messages from the developer. To keep the game colorblind-friendly, there are options to add custom colors, textures, or even faces to the jelly blocks.

This description was written by Asher Stone.