Globesweeper

I’ve already spent an embarrassing amount of time playing this old and simple puzzle classic. Underneath its galactic-themed boards, it’s really just regular old minesweeper. There are a few new features added onto it like different tile shapes and some planet-themed skins to unlock, but mostly it’s simply a well-done remake of the classic game. But they did it as well as anyone could have hoped for, and for just $2 on Steam, I’m not complaining.

The ambient soundtrack is quiet and relaxing, and for me it’s one of the standout features. Whenever you reveal a space, the resulting sound effects blend perfectly with this soundtrack – so much that it took me a while to even realize the sound effects were related to my clicks at all. The result is an experience that is a little bit of puzzle solving combined with a little bit of relaxing music-making at the same time.

The globe (board) is naturally intuitive to control, with a left-click and drag to rotate the globe and right-click and drag to rotate the camera angle, and zoom on scroll. Sure, I still sometimes mis-click on the wrong square and lose the game from it, but that’s my fault and not the game’s.

The tile shape options include a triangle, square, and hex mode. I’ve played mostly on square since it’s the most similar to what I was familiar with in traditional minesweeper, and after having tried the others a bit, I think square’s still my favorite of the three. They are different enough that you’ll have to think differently about the puzzle each time you switch to a different shape. Although I’m not 100% sure, my impression is that the difficulty increases from hex to square to triangle. The exception though is that with the hex puzzles…I don’t know how to explain this in terms of math or whatever, but it’s hard to gain as much information from neighboring revealed tiles as with squares or triangles. So it can feel a bit mindless at times, and the challenge comes down more to making sure you’ve revealed every possible informative tile, which often left me just circling the entire perimeter for the expansion point, which slowed me down considerably on any attempts at colossal size. But with a soundtrack and sound effects as relaxing as what we see here, mindless and relaxing repetition might be exactly what some people are looking for, and I think the hex puzzles are best for this.

For someone who knows what they’re doing, the colossal-sized puzzle with default mine density and square tiles can be done in under an hour, although an expert (not me) could probably achieve well under this time. For someone who just wants a one-minute challenge, the puzzle sizes range down to a smaller globe that . In fact, the “globe” nature of the puzzles is more obvious at these lower sizes, since at the colossal size you’re essentially just solving one big plane, with edges and corners if you’re doing it in square mode.

There’s an option, on by default, to make the puzzles always solvable without guessing. Now this doesn’t mean you’ll never have to logically rule out some possibilities especially at the beginning (sometimes) and at the end, but it does eliminate the frustration of spending an hour working on a colossal-sized puzzle only to find you have a 50-50 chance of succeeding at the end. Minesweeper purists may relish that challenge anyway though, so there remains the option to just get a totally random grid with no guarantees of solvability.

There are some achievements of varying difficulty, and some built-in competition with leaderboards or even with just trying to beat my own personal best. I’ve spent about 30 tries attempting to clear the colossal board in “less than a microcentury” for the corresponding achievement, and although I’ve come close at least twice, I haven’t yet succeeded.

Never in my life have I been so proficient at the useless skill that is minesweeper, but it’s been a fun and relaxing in the evening or as a break from the routine of the day. This is the only version of minesweeper I’ll be playing for a while.