Do you remember the first time you played Tetris? I do. I didn’t let go for the whole afternoon, and only stopped because I had to have dinner.
Alexey Pazhitnov, the creator of Tetris, has a very ingenious mind. Ever since Tetris, he’s been creating other puzzle games such as Hexic and Pandora’s Box. More recently, I stumbled upon another of his creations: Alexey’s Dwice.
“I am happy to introduce to you our new game, DWICE. The game of style I like. We had a great time working on it and had real fun testing and balancing it. So, it seems, we made a cool game for you. Enjoy!”, said Alexey Pazhitnov when his new puzzle was published.
Alexey’s Dwice was a co-operative project between Alexey and WildSnake Software, released to celebrate the third anniversary of the company.
The story is fairly simple. The game world is covered in snow and ice, and there are avalanches everywhere. You progress through a series of stages where the avalanches keep coming down, and you have to stop them from reaching the bottom of the board, in order to save the villagers and their houses. If all three houses are destroyed, you lose.
At first glance, it might seem a bit like upside-down Tetris, but instead of putting the pieces together, you have to take them out of the puzzle board. You have to match two pieces by shape to remove them, and you get extra points if you also match them by color. The mass of pieces just keeps coming until the block with the number for the stage appears. When it does, you have to isolate it by removing all the pieces around it, and only then you can advance. When you clear the board, that stage becomes free of snow, and little by little the game world becomes a warmer place to live in.
Avalanches may contain some useful pieces. If you match the blocks containing “specials” you won’t accumulate them. Instead, you have to isolate them so they melt. The specials include fire barriers that when used melt every ice block from the bottom to the top of the board, dynamite to break ice blocks into tiny pieces (not as helpful as you think since you end up with odd shapes) and ice picks to destroy blocks of ice.
The game isn’t as easy as it seems though. The avalanches come down fairly quick, and at times you are given a single wider board or even two independent puzzle boards (but you can match pieces from one side with those on the other side). It gets complicated pretty fast.
Dwice offers two gameplay modes: Quest, where you clear the world from snow throughout nine areas and 60 stages, and Arcade, where you play an endless amount of challenges of gradually increasing difficulty.
Dwice also has an official high score table at the WildSnake site where you can see how you rank against players from around the world. Just from playing the hour-long demo, I got ranked 76 on the Quest score table, yay!
Alexey’s Dwice is a clever puzzle with very simple gameplay mechanics. It’s challenging and addictive, the graphics are colorful and bright, the sound effects reflect all sorts of freezing and icy situations, and the music is the kind that you can’t get out of your head after five minutes. Puzzle enthusiasts shouldn’t miss out on this one.