The Guides is an iOS puzzler that I haven't spent much time with. It was just too difficult and frustrating to use at times. While I appreciate the straightforwardness of the game's presentation and type of puzzle, I didn't have fun at all with it. Build around a series of logic puzzles, Vignettes has you try and decipher layer upon layer of mysteries in a series of screens that have only a vague link between them; Not letting you appreciate each mechanic of the puzzle long enough before moving on to something else.
I'm not going to spend much time talking about the puzzles themselves here; They range from converting binary to characters and doing simple cyphers, you even have tools to do what the game asks of you (although they're a bit frustrating to use because you have different keyboard screens and it should've all been part of the same UI) but the real puzzle is to figure out what you're supposed to do. Sometimes it's pretty straightforward, but other levels have you go back a few screens in order to figure out some bit of the puzzle. You barely can get any hints, and they refresh every 24 hours, which doesn,t help if you're stuck at multiple levels in a row.
Which ultimately is what happened to me. I like the idea of decoding binary (although the usage of a tool that automatically does it for you strips the puzzle of much challenge) and finding specially marked letters in a document, but some puzzles were just too much for me. I couldn't resort to looking the answers on the internet; it would defeat the whole point, so I just stopped.
