A good puzzle game shares qualities with a good poem: precision, elegance, a growing feeling of resonance that climaxes, finally, in the quiet euphoria of a revelation. Originality, too, of course, as neither poem nor puzzle game can blossom in the shadows of imitation. Finity, a taut and cascadingly inventive puzzle game by Sebastian Gosztyla, has all of this and more.
You play on a four-by-four grid filled with 16 coloured tiles. Swipe on any row or column and you can move the entire sequence up and down, or left and right. The grid is wraparound: shunt one coloured tile off one edge and it will reappear on its opposite. In this way you must manoeuvre the tiles until you match three-of-a-kind, at which point they disappear from the grid, which duly refills from the top.
So far, so straightforward. Finity’s twist is that tiles can only be moved so many times before they lock into place, preventing their row or column from moving until they are cleared. Flippant swipers will soon find themselves gridlocked. With each move the possibility space narrows, until a careless player will have locked themselves into an immovable pattern, as the columns become like the bars on a prison cell. The phone shudders if you attempt to slide a locked line; you feel your failure in the fingers.
Finity soon reveals itself, then, to be a game about thoughtfulness and chess-like foresight, whereby you must anticipate the next move and, ideally, the three moves after that. You have time to ponder – unless, of course, you opt for tempo mode, in which your moves add to an accompanying musical track that demands you keep pace with its driving pulse. At this point the game acquires an almost meditative, trance-like quality, as its haptics, audio and visuals combine to form a mesmerising cognitive task, one as soothing as it is challenging.
