Square Valley is a solid puzzler for iOS where you place tiles around a map, draw roads and rivers and try to maximize your score to hit a certain target with the constraints of the level you are in. I had a lot of fun with it, even tho I feel like the game could’ve worded some stuff a bit better and surfaced more data overall. It was still a pretty inventive and interesting game!
The core concept of the game is simple, you have to spend a few turns building your valley and every turn you get to pick a tile from a list of choices. Tiles have various effects, which can range from giving you points in their simplest form to allowing you to place more times, get more choices and much more. The points given by tiles sometimes depends on many factors - for instance, the tile needs to be adjacent to flowers, enclosed inside a fence, near a road, not on the same column or row as another tile, etc.
At specified intervals, you get to place roads, rivers and fences around the valley and you need to draw them in a free-form manner. There are some restrictions on their placement - they can’t intersect in weird ways, etc - but you get to shape the map as you see fit. When all the turns are over, you get points tallied for everything and you pass or fail the map. As you go along the game, the puzzles impose you specific tiles, like a tree that needs to be surrounded by other trees if you don’t want to incur a huge penalty. It’s usually pretty clear, but some tiles are just worded strangely, with double negatives and effects that are not straightforward enough, I spent a bit of time wondering how exactly I would get points for a specific tile and thought it was in the bag, only for the end screen to tell me that I didn’t get it. I wish the game surfaced well if you met conditions for tiles in advance.
But that’s just a very small criticism for an otherwise real neat product. If you want to have a good, calm puzzle time on iOS, Square Valley is certainly there for you!
