Colorzzle - Thoughts

Simplicity can be a fickle concept. Akin to an amateur tightrope walker, it wobbles awkwardly between elegant and boring, ready to plunge off either side at a moment's notice. The Atari 2600 and its ilk know this pain all too well, their vast libraries reduced to little more than droll oddities nowadays. But puzzle games tend to fare better at skirting this fate; sudoku, crossword puzzles, Wordle, Minesweeper, Tetris, and innumerable others are played daily by folks both young and old. There's something about a repeatable brain teaser that never grows stale, like listening to your favorite song from a decade ago or sipping from a cold drink after a mile run. However, boredom awaits on the other side of the tightrope, a dreadful reminder that inoculation does not mean immunization. 

Case-in-point: Colorzzle, a visually-pleasing, simple puzzler that's about as deep as a single coat of paint.

The premise behind Colorzzle is deliciously succinct: match open blocks with their required color. Got a red open block? Slot a red square next to it. A green open block? Try a green square—or you can sandwich it between one blue and one yellow square instead! The ability to "blend" adjacent colors to create secondary (and tertiary) hues is at the core of Colorzzle's challenge, as well as its main draw. Being given a scattered rainbow of cubes and having to neatly organize them can be a fun endeavor... but the appeal doesn't last long.

The big problem is that Colorzzle doesn't really require much thought from the player. Once you've memorized the various color combinations, puzzles boil down to mechanical busywork. The longest puzzles tend to be those that require the most reorganization, the solution only mildly obscured from the player. Colorzzle tries to spice things up with new mechanics like color-changing blocks and optic beams, but these aren't new tools in your repertoire as much as they're static blocks that take a couple of clicks to get "right". In Colorzzle's hour-long run time, I only found the postgame puzzles to be worthy of my brainpower—so about a tenth of the game. The rest of my playthrough was simply fine: too pleasant to ever become annoying, but too dull to deserve a place in my memory.

All things considered, there are worse things for a puzzle game to be than boring. A hellish experience like Understand instantly flits to mind, with its dense web of obscure rules and moon-logic that blows past "stupefying" and lands on "just stupid." It's probably better for a game to be "boring" rather than "dumb", but there aren't really any takeaways to be had with the former—just a gentle disappointment, like crawling into bed only to realize you forgot your phone charger downstairs. It's an innocuous sin that—at most—elicits a tsk... which was my exact reaction upon finishing Colorzzle. For a game so visually vibrant, Colorzzle's gameplay is about as gray as you can get.