Overview: A puzzle game that makes use of the unique movement of the knight, a chess piece that jumps two squares away horizontally and one square vertically or two squares away vertically and one square horizontally. The goal of each puzzle is simple: cover the red spaces with red knights and blue spaces with blue knights.
20180606 AM:
Completed the first two sets. The last level of the second set was tricky.
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| Cover the red spaces with the red knights and the blue spaces with the blue knights. |
Steam Game Time: 30 minutes (session game time)
20180606 PM:
A major strategy in this game for more difficult puzzles is thinking backwards; like a maze.
But sometimes it's a mix of luck. And often it's about pushing pieces around. Creating a chain of pieces.
Another general strategy is making use of the fact that a knight has more limited movement away from the center. Take the additional limited movement of the pieces on a given board into account.
Symmetry vs. Asymmetry.
C-3 was neat because the fact that it was a simple permutation was slightly obscured (because the labels of the different pieces are colors which makes it feel less permuted). But believe!
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| The yellow knights take up space. They're annoying. |
Steam Game Time: 82 minutes (session game time)* / 112 minutes (total game time)
*I left the game on for a couple minutes while I drank my vitamins. Possibly 10 minutes.
20180608 AM:
I finished the level four (Queen) stages and then I stopped at the fourth level of the fifth (King) stage (which I tried once before deciding it was a good time to go to sleep.
Steam Game Time: 2.6 hours (total game time)
20180611:
D-5 was giving me lots of trouble. So I spent 6 minutes to draw the network of nodes and edges and 4 minutes to do another after filling small nodes. Then I spent 9 minutes understanding it. Apparently space D-4 was critical in switching from "one track" to "another track." Following this analysis, it took seconds to complete the puzzle upon returning to the game.
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| This level gave me the most trouble. |
In any case, I just need two more achievements for 100%: Clear 10 Daily Levels and 25 Daily Levels (I've already completed 5 Daily Levels).
Besides just trial-and-error, my general strategy involves the following three steps:
1) Determining which spaces have only one path leading towards them (and more generally keeping track of how many connections a space has)
2) Backtracking the spaces I need until I get to an open space (mentioned above as "creating a chain of pieces")
3) Thinking of how certain actions permute the pieces and how I can combine different groups to permute the pieces to achieve what I want.
Steam Game Time: 3.0 hours (session game time) / 5.6 hours (total game time)
Thoughts:
Pros:
+ Minimalist
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| This level was interesting. It's solution was beautiful. |
Neutral:
~ Procedurally-generated levels
Cons:
- Lacks a "fewest moves" feature.
- Fairly easy given a handful of basic principals. I was only stuck on about four or five puzzles.
- Generally puzzles look difficult but aren't.
Summary:
Overall, the game was simple; in fact, that's part of the reason why I kept playing (because I knew I could finish it in a short amount of time).
However, mileage may vary and some players may find the game more difficult and some may find it even easier than I found it. I would also note that chess players would neither necessarily like nor dislike the game.
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| There are five difficulties. |
I neither recommend for nor against the game.
20220702:
Not too long ago I decided that instead of playing as many games from my library as possible, I would actually start to focus on certain games. As part of that, today I started browsing the list of games I have under my Steam "Complete Eventually" category. Among them,
KNIGHTS randomy caught my eye. Getting into the game, I realized I completed the main campaign, but had the option of doing 20 Daily puzzles to complete the remaining achievements. After doing about 10 it began to get boring, but I decided to push on with the grind.
Adding to the general strategy above, I would say today I focused on the following:
1) Fill the corners and edges (similar to number one above).
2) Focusing on getting a yellow Knight to it's position is often as useful as getting a red or blue Knight into position (in trying to fulfill number one)
3) Sometimes instead of cycles, it's better to think about opportunities to swap pieces. That is, how should one make use of the gaps to swap two pieces
Steam Game Time: 2.8 hours (session game time) / 8.4 hours (total game time)
KNIGHTS (PC) (2016)
Relevant Links:
KNIGHTS (Steam Store Page)
