Polarium Advance

This strange late-era Game Boy Advance release was developed simultaneously with a DS release the year prior. Each game features tiles on a playfield that must be color-matched per row by drawing a line that flips all tiles beneath it. Although the two games seem structurally different, this Advance release is effectively an elaboration of the DS game’s static puzzle mode, with the arcade-style falling block variant discarded. Perhaps this was an acknowledgement of the shift in tactility between the consoles, as the smooth winning strokes made with a stylus on DS must be translated to non-continuous d-pad inputs on GBA. A time attack mode attempts to add a speed element back into the game, but it boils down merely to solving a set of puzzles back-to-back as quickly as possible.

Given that rows are the only spatial category that counts, some of the rules become very quickly obvious when constructing lines. There’s no ability to cross back over your own line to doubly flip a piece, so going horizontally between two separate colors on the same line is never feasible. This makes the game primarily a test of finding junction points between separate lines where one can cross one from color into another vertically to give each row a separate hue while maintaining the continuity of the line. When the game fails, it has you simply trace a line across all blocks of a single color; obfuscating the junction points through their color discontinuity is the only confounding factor for the player, such that puzzles that ignore that wrinkle can’t hide their viable lines at all. A more subtle adjacent issue is horizontally mirrored (across the vertical axis) puzzles devolving into the player solving one side and repeating a mirrored version of their line on the other (some puzzles manage to provide mirrored structures that somehow can be solved separately on either side of the line). Common idioms include checkerboard columns, which almost always must be drawn all the way through to avoid horizontal same-color movement. These make it more or less explicit to the player that each row will be an alternating color. Uneven caverns of a color all in a chunk spread across multiple rows ask the player to construct a line that can flip every block within while conforming to particular entrance and exit tiles, which result in intestine-like zig-zagging through an area or using a different color from an adjacent row to provide a little extra room.

One can see here how the puzzle’s line is replicated almost identically between the right and left side, with only a slight alteration on the orientation on the 2x2 solid color flip between the two. Although the same 2x2 pattern is used (inverted and flipped) three times in each 4x4 block, the inward-facing variant has its one-tile color used in the line while the outward-facing variants have their three-tile color used. One can also see how this breaks the internal continuity for the colors on the second line from the top and the bottom. [src]

There are small factors that the developers use to remove easy solutions and modulate the difficulty of each puzzle. A bounding box on the playfield may be used as lanes to draw the line without changing the rows, although the harder puzzles often strategically place barriers within this areas (especially on the corners). This interacts strangely with puzzles that are not rectangular and instead have multiple rectangles with auto-conforming blocks in the row that will change to the dominant color of said row and thus are automatic. Said auto-conforming blocks ignore flips and thus often provide ample open space for line manipulation. The one minor, optional suggestion against abusing this comes in the form of both “par” objectives for line length and suggested start/stop blocks for unorthodox routes; each objective is revealed after the initial completion of a level. A more rare level type involves a gravity system a la the DS version, where full-row horizontal chains will clear and drop blocks above down below, making the rows not visible at the start. As this might imply, first runs often involve just killing the chain and looking at where the blocks fall to brute force the solution, and unfortunately given the equally ample space in the playfield, the developers have no tricks for obfuscating the “correct” lines and chain junctions in most of these cases. With enough puzzles to last daily for a year, I grew weary around July/August puzzles and tapped out after the level 4 difficulty puzzles seemed scarcely harder than the bog of level 3 I had been trapped in for in-game months. Would have much preferred a structure that allowed jumping more quickly up the ranks; nothing in this game interested me enough to want to play it every single day.

Although the presentation is minimal, the music intervenes to provide a bit of character. The loping kicks and stuttering off-beat hi-hats of Spring-Summer keep the atmosphere relaxed and repetitive, buoyed only by pitch-bent pads until a wistful lead peeks in a ways into the track. The other daily challenge songs stick with similar rhythms, often leaning on similarly uneven triplet or dotted eighth structures punctuated with chintzy auxiliary percussion.