I love the variant sudoku is available through here and the intuitive app layout. Some of them are so hard that the hints don’t seem to make any sense because they just states are gonna be true without any explanation. Greater detail in the hints would be very helpful.Most importantly, I really wish that all the different packs were integrated into one app on my phone. I’m happy to keep paying the same amount per pack of puzzles, five dollars for Thermo, five dollars per knight pack, etc. But having a whole bunch of different apps to switch through is complicated to figure out which puzzle I want, where it is, and it and clutters up my phone. I really like that this version they released has multiple packs to buy within it, and I hope that they keep adding other options for in app purchases within this one app.

I absolutely love the channel and solving puzzles. I don’t pretend to be the same level of genius as people who complete these puzzles within an hour but o knew I could try my hand at some puzzles and slowly build a skill set. Although the puzzles so far have been brutally challenging, I have found it to be an enjoyable experience for the most part. However. The one thing that is making some levels absolutely horrible experiences are the hints. The hints themselves often require leaps of logic that are in no way clear to the untrained eye. I will read some hints that claim something that I cannot for the life of mean prove to be true or understand and I don’t feel it’s right to make progress off of logic I don’t understand so I get stuck. The hints NEED to be readdressed and modified for anyone at any skill level. Although I already said I’m not a genius, I’m can say with a certain level of confidence that I am rather intelligent but it was still very very rough at times.

The puzzles are great, but the update is making things hard to enjoy them. I love that the newest update included a new set of puzzles, but the quality of life changes certainly hurt my enjoyment of the app. I particularly miss the eraser (I realize the backspace key functions as an eraser, but it visually is less intuitive than an actual eraser icon) and the bulk erase trash bin, but the layout change is also distracting and unwieldy - in landscape mode, the puzzle is shoved as far to the left of the screen as possible with an awkward dead space on the right with the inputs below it. Why the forward/reverse, back, setting, and hint boxes aren’t in the dead space, I don’t know - instead they’re squashed between the puzzle and the number keys, making the bottom right of the screen very visually cluttered.

I love Cracking the Cryptic, and the puzzles they have in the app are truly fantastic. The app has great marking features (two forms of pencil marking and colors) for solving these difficult puzzles as well. However, it eats battery like crazy and has (relatively) few puzzles for the price tag on each pack. Battery Life: 100% battery on my iPhone 14 Pro Max gets drained to ~50% after only a couple hours of play. Puzzle updates: I appreciate that they are hand crafted and manually hinted, but updates are frustratingly few and far between. I would love to play puzzles from videos here instead of Sudoku Pad (which doesn’t always import correctly), even without hints, for more content and variety.