Cracking the Cryptic

Probably the single best YouTuber game ever made and it's not even close. It's hard to understate how much this game's reinvigorated my interest for sudoku and, more broadly, the entire Nikoli-school of pen-and-paper logic puzzle games like Kakuro and Akari/Light Up. A cursory glance at Cracking the Cryptic may cause someone to be like "oh, only a small fraction of these are for free? that's sad" but these are no normal sudoku puzzles. Almost everything here is a type of variant sudoku; the most popular variant of sudoku is Killer Sudoku, but there are loads and almost every single puzzle here has some novel combination of variants that forces you to think in a new way every time. As such, if you're already experienced in normal sudoku, these puzzles force you to think rather than repeat the same old methods to solve any puzzle, and usually take a fair bit longer and are also way, way more mentally fulfilling to complete.

If you've played a lot of and burnt out of normal sudoku, you need to play this game, full stop. It's the freshest take on the game since its conception and it'll remind you of what made you love it in the first place. Depending on your existing sudoku skill level, the number of levels you get out of this before tapping out may vary (for me it was about 20-ish) but the earlier difficulties are stellar at introducing the sorts of things levels will ask you to keep track of, and it doesn't take super long to ramp up and difficulty and get to your first puzzle with no traditional number hints, which are always insanely satisfying to slowly chip away at.

My biggest problems are that the hints, especially in harder levels, aren't very good at explaining and often become indigestible with the amount of coordinates and candidate numbers sometimes thrown at the player. It's the main reason I didn't persist with the later puzzles, often you're put in a puzzle, have no clue where to start, and click the hint and get something that's barely helpful at all. But even in their dubiously helpful nature, they highlight the main reason why you would ever consider paying for sudoku puzzles when you could easily just look them up and get an inexhaustible amount of them: these are hand-designed puzzles. They are designed with a player in mind, they are designed to be able to be approachable and deducible. The human-designed sudoku puzzles here have machine generated sudoku handily beaten as far as "A-ha!" moments go, even if they do get a little impenetrable at higher star difficulties. It would be almost impossible to get a machine to generate sudoku puzzles as varied and novel as these and still have them be solve-able, but having them human-made makes it so that it's guaranteed there is a "best path of deduction" that makes finding it feel so much more of a worthwhile pursuit.

But yes, the long and short of it is that this is wonderful. If you're a long-time fan of sudoku, or even someone who has a passing interest in it but got bored quickly due to its monotony once you've got a lot of the big skills down, this is a no brainer recommendation, especially considering how much time you can get out of it without paying a dime.