🎃 The Big Stuff

New Mode: Campgrounds

• One word per board. Every board is built from a word with no repeated letter. Place its letters so each one appears once in every row, every column and every camp.
• Camps. A camp is a patch of cells inside a thick border. It can be any shape, as long as it holds as many cells as the word has letters, and it still holds each letter once even when it bends round a corner.
• The letter keypad. Select a cell, then pick a letter. The keys are the board’s own letter tiles, laid out in word order.
• A colour for every letter. Each letter tile wears its own coloured band, so lookalikes such as C and G, or O and D, are easy to tell apart at a glance.
• Letter counter. A tally beside the board shows how many of each letter are left to place, and spins when a letter is done.
• Pencil marks and hints. Pencil in the letters a cell could still hold, and ask for a hint when you are stuck. Hints name the technique they use.
• Seventeen How To Play pages. The rules, camps and pencil marks first, then every technique from Naked Single to Swordfish, including the Campgrounds special, the Law of Leftovers.
• Its own settings tab. Check Solution, Highlight Matching, Show Errors which Break Rules, Show Letter Counter and Pencil Marks on a Grid.
• Try it free. Six Campgrounds boards are waiting in the Welcome Pack, from a 6x6 FOREST up to an 11x11 CAMPGROUNDS.

Halloween Hike: Our First Story Pack

A Halloween hike that goes very wrong. Our hiker sets off well prepared, loses the trail at sunset, and finds that the woods are a lot busier after dark than anyone expected.

A word puzzle can say something, so we wanted to find out whether a pack of them could tell a story you want to finish. Each board is one line of the tale, and the word you solve is the word that carries it. We have never made anything quite like it, and we cannot wait to see what you make of it.

• 101 boards in story order. From 6x6 up to 16x16, across five chapters: Setting Out, Getting Lost & Obstacles, The Vampires’ Campfire, The Witches’ Bonfire, and Reaching the Cabin & Sleep.
• Read as you solve. Every line of the story is hidden except for its puzzle’s word. Solve the board and the whole line appears.
• A story you can turn. Each chapter is a page on a ring around you. Grab a page and swing it round to move between chapters, then pick any line to play its board. When you finish, you land back in the story.
• Difficulty follows the story. Gentle while the sun is up, harder as the night closes in, with a breather at the quiet moments.
• Included with the game on Steam. On Meta Quest it is an optional pack.

Tell Us What You Think

This is how we find out whether the experiment worked. Two new ways to tell us, built for exactly this:

• Puzzle Vibe Check. Finish a puzzle and the results screen asks how it felt: heart eyes, a party, a thumbs up or down, a sleepy face, and a few more. Change your mind and pick again; your latest pick is the one that counts. We read these to decide what to make next.
• Polls. The message of the day on the title screen can now carry a quick poll. One vote per player.
• Both need you to be online.

Menus and Comfort

• New level balls. One ball for every puzzle type, with the game’s name running round it and the board size on its face, so you can tell them apart at a glance.
• Pencil Marks on a Grid. A new setting for Sudoku and Campgrounds, on by default. Every pencil mark sits in its own fixed spot in the cell, so the same mark is always in the same place.
• Fairer par times. Par times and difficulty ratings in the packs were worked out again from how puzzles really get solved in a headset. Sudoku par in particular was far too tight.
• Tall boards fit. The results screen now frames tall boards properly instead of cutting them off.
• Tidier pointer. The pointer hides while your hand is holding something.

Performance

We profiled the game on Quest 3 scene by scene, from menus to giant boards seen up close, and spent what we found on a sharper picture and more headroom.

• Steady 72 fps on Quest 3. Every scene we tested holds a steady 72 fps with headroom to spare, including big Sudoku boards close up and 50x50 Minesweeper.
• A sharper picture on Quest 3. The game now draws 20% more pixels in each direction, paid for with a lighter anti-aliasing setting.
• Lighting baked into the sky. Two of the three lights in the scene are now painted into the sky instead of lit live, and the small lights that followed your hands are gone, so every pixel does less work. In passthrough, boards and menus are now lit the same way as in VR.
• Lighter level balls. Every puzzle type shares one ball, and balls far away drop their fine detail.
• Less CPU, more graphics. Graphics set the pace on Quest, not the CPU, so the game now asks for a lower CPU level and leaves the power for drawing.
• A leaner Quest build. Code that only other platforms need is stripped out of the Quest version, and each frame sends less data to the headset.

Fixed

• Settings from older saves. Sudoku and Nonogram settings carried over from older saves now apply properly.

Coming Next

• More stories? That is up to you. Your Vibe Checks, poll answers and feedback decide whether story packs become a regular thing.
• Campgrounds in the Daily Challenge. Campgrounds joins the daily rotation once we have seen how the first boards land with you.

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