Personally, I quite enjoy the trend of simple puzzle games being ported over to Minetest. I think it's a breath of fresh air in a landscape otherwise dominated by the survival-crafting genre. With that said, this version of sudoku is not particularly good.
The problems start at the hotbar. The game represents numbers as physical items, but displays 9 items over of 8 item slots. With none of the items lining up with their slots, keeping track of your selection becomes notably harder than it ought to be.
Due to the vertical presentation of the board, the upper rows are difficult to see or access from the ground. Thus, the player needs to enter flying mode if they want a good shot at completing the puzzle. Rather than enhancing the game or putting a twist on it, the 3rd dimension here only serves to make solving puzzles more of a hassle.
The game has checks to prevent illegal moves, but doesn't have any automatic check to see if you've completed the puzzle. Instead, you must fly over to the block labelled "FINISCH" and punch it. Rather than advancing levels, it then requires you to go back to the level selection blocks, punch the relevant one, and click on the next level. The game doesn't bother telling you which levels are completed either, though it's not hard to guess since they unlock sequentially.
The game suffers from a general lack of polish. Whereas most 'minigames' use the player's inventory as a level menu, this game leaves in the standard Minetest Game menu complete with a crafting grid and craftguide listing every recipe from MTG... There's barely any feedback to moves, and no way to place potential numbers like most Sudoku games do either. The whole thing has serious "barebones proof-of-concept" vibes to it despite having been released 4 years ago and still receiving updates to this day.
I don't think it's impossible to make a puzzle like Sudoku work in Minetest, but this clearly needs more design and development work to be good.
Interesting concept, poor execution
Personally, I quite enjoy the trend of simple puzzle games being ported over to Minetest. I think it's a breath of fresh air in a landscape otherwise dominated by the survival-crafting genre. With that said, this version of sudoku is not particularly good.
The problems start at the hotbar. The game represents numbers as physical items, but displays 9 items over of 8 item slots. With none of the items lining up with their slots, keeping track of your selection becomes notably harder than it ought to be.
Due to the vertical presentation of the board, the upper rows are difficult to see or access from the ground. Thus, the player needs to enter flying mode if they want a good shot at completing the puzzle. Rather than enhancing the game or putting a twist on it, the 3rd dimension here only serves to make solving puzzles more of a hassle.
The game has checks to prevent illegal moves, but doesn't have any automatic check to see if you've completed the puzzle. Instead, you must fly over to the block labelled "FINISCH" and punch it. Rather than advancing levels, it then requires you to go back to the level selection blocks, punch the relevant one, and click on the next level. The game doesn't bother telling you which levels are completed either, though it's not hard to guess since they unlock sequentially.
The game suffers from a general lack of polish. Whereas most 'minigames' use the player's inventory as a level menu, this game leaves in the standard Minetest Game menu complete with a crafting grid and craftguide listing every recipe from MTG... There's barely any feedback to moves, and no way to place potential numbers like most Sudoku games do either. The whole thing has serious "barebones proof-of-concept" vibes to it despite having been released 4 years ago and still receiving updates to this day.
I don't think it's impossible to make a puzzle like Sudoku work in Minetest, but this clearly needs more design and development work to be good.
awesome sudoku for minetest
Now with the Version 5.x or newer you can solve puzzles ... sudoku-!!