Threes! review

[Administrator]

Like so many of the things installed on your iPhone, Threes! is a game of pattern-matching. A one and a two make a three. Threes and up can be matched only with identical tiles. 'Swipe to combine tiles' is all the instruction you really need to get started, and indeed the game offers little more than that as you complete its wonderfully light-touch tutorial sequence. Of course, by then it's too late. It's much too late.
Threes' best joke is that it's a match-two puzzler. It's not a maths game, and despite having numbers everywhere you look, it involves none of that tricky adding-up or taking-away. These numbers are used merely as identifiers. The game could equally have employed colours, or pictures of cats, or smells to identify its pieces. Do not be put off by the pictures of numbers, it is not they that will be making you feel a bit thick.
From the team responsible for the pain-is-pleasure sado-ludism of Puzzlejuice, Threes! is the video game equivalent of one of those hipster restaurants that serves unconscionably delightful food, but insists on doing so in the most terrifyingly smug surroundings imaginable. The brutalist mechanical simplicity of the gameplay is bonded to an audio landscape of shameless hipster whimsy - and if the graphic design loves Letterpress so much, why doesn't it just marry it?
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