146. Polarium (Mitchell Corporation, DS, 2005)

Developed by Buster Bros. crators Mitchell, Polarium was a launch game for the Nintendo DS in Japan and Europe, but was released a few months later in North America. Polarium is a simple puzzle game where you are clearing rows from a grid by flipping tiles over so that each row is entirely black or white, with all of the gameplay controlled via the DS stylus.

The main puzzle mode of the game has 100 puzzles of varying sizes and difficulty, but each must be cleared with a single stroke. As much as I love Tetris, generally I prefer a puzzle game/mode that lets me sit back and think about it, and Polarium has this in spades. It was amazing how fast I was seeing patterns emerge and it feels great to draw a huge unwieldy snake through the screen and watch it all snap into order. While the first 20-25 puzzles were pretty simple and have a nice difficulty progression, once I hit 30 or so, the difficulty really started to ramp up so that I had to actually think about the puzzles, and that made solving them all the sweeter. A commonality to another puzzle game I've enjoyed this year, game #84 Puzzle Link 2, is that both have a very limited number of things you can do, which helps me not feel overwhelmed.

The sounds in Polarium are great, too, which is another thing that I value in a  puzzle game. Highlighting cells has such a great snap to it that gives me great feedback. The music, on the other hand, is kind of just ambient and boring, but that doesn't bother me too much.

In addition to a puzzle mode, there is also a more action-oriented challenge mode, which has blocks continuously falling from the top of the screen. While I initially disliked this mode, after a couple dozen puzzles, I was more comfortable with the mechanics, and I've been getting higher scores each time I play challenge mode. This is making me think: why doesn't Picross have some kind of mode like this? I've been training so may hundreds of hours for something like that.

5/5, a chill, deceptively simple puzzle game that makes me yearn for action Picross