Origin review: Simple and addictive yes, challenging maybe not

I love puzzle games. I’m not talking about the ever popular match 3 puzzle games that flood the iTunes top ten list every week. I’m talking about genuine puzzle games that make you think before you move. Games that challenge your brain so much that you have set your iPhone down for a minute and take a breather. That’s what I was hoping for when I picked up Sompom’s Origin Brainsquare, but alas the Cambodia-based game developer failed to make it a challenge.

That’s not to say that Origin Brainsquare is a bad game by any means. Origin Brainsquare takes a super-simple concept and makes a genuine puzzle game that was fun to play. In each level you are shown several colorful squares that need to be lined up in a way that matches the colors and connects the appropriate dots. This would be an easy enough task for anyone to do, except that you have a limited number of moves. You can’t just move pieces randomly in hopes of success, you have to legitimately think. Or at least that’s what Sompom intended, anyways.

The puzzles in Origin Brainsquare are unfortunately far too easy. It is easy to get overwhelmed by them if you just look at the mess of colors, but if you focus on connecting one specific color with its designated dot, all of the other colors will follow suit. This makes the game incredibly simple.

Origin Brainsquare does have four different difficulty settings that range from Pack Initial, the tutorial, all the way to Pack Hard, and contains a whopping 353 puzzles to solve. Although the puzzles in Pack Hard are more challenging, I still was able to zoom right through a large chunk of them. The number of puzzles is nice, but a lot of the easier ones seemed to repeat earlier puzzles and got boring pretty quickly.

One thing that Origin Brainsquare does incredibly well is its sound. The game’s background music is just that: background music. It is intentionally soft so that players can focus on the puzzles. More importantly the sound effects are absolutely perfect. The sound of the blocks lining up after being moved is incredibly satisfying. There were times where I’d move just to hear the sound. So good.

The game does not focus breathtaking visuals, but rather goes for a very simple yet pleasing look. You simply have a white background with different colored squares. That’s it. Simple yet elegant.

Lastly the game does suffer from an abundance of ads. Every few levels you will see either a video or banner ad pop up for a different game. Don’t get me wrong, this is terribly annoying, but way better than the alternative of a stamina system. If there is going to be any monetization scheme in this puzzle game, I’m glad to see that it is ad-based. Now it should be noted that you can remove the ads through an in-app purchase, but who wants to do that? Along with the in-app purchases you can also buy hints, but I’ve got a feeling you won’t be needing any help with these puzzles.

Origin Brainsquare is a promising game with a simple-yet-elegant style and look to it. I would have liked to see more challenging puzzles, but there are over 350 puzzles to keep you busy even if you do blow through most of them in a matter of seconds. The game is free to play and is can be found at both the App Store and Google Play.

UPDATE 02-04-14: This review has been edited to include info on the in-app purchases.