



Many challenges break down to a numbers game and an ability to count backward from the border’s end goal: if you need to end on red but only have one red square, it’s a matter of ensuring that red square is left to last (along with something white). Once past these beginner levels, Color Zen‘s puzzles are innovative and engaging, yet still not especially difficult. While this creates a great variety of mechanics as you progress, it unfortunately wastes the first five levels of each stage on very basic, tutorial-esque challenges that require little thought. Only pulsating shapes can be moved white shapes become whatever color touches them and black shapes erase whatever shape they touch, along with themselves.Įach of the six, 20-level stages in Color Zen introduces one of these concepts at its start, from white shapes to “shields” that can prevent a shape from dissolving into a same-colored background. Shapes that are inscribed within other shapes are safe from this, but can only be accessed by clearing the outer shapes first. Any free-floating shapes that are the same color as a newly painted background will be lost to the background. While this concept starts off slowly, asking you to slide a pink ball into a pink square to match the goal of a pink border, the challenge ramps up quickly.Īs the stages progress, a lot of small yet significant details begin to come into play. The screen will change every time two same-colored shapes collide, which causes the shapes to explode and paint the background whatever color they were. Your goal in Color Zen is, not surprisingly, quite simple: change the color of your screen to match the color of the level’s border. Although not a genre definer alone, Color Zen is a worthy addition to their shapely ranks. As the ultimate renditions of pick-up-and-play, entries like Hundreds, Mosaique, and Blendokuhave dropped shiny gems and cutesy creatures for the sake of simplified, streamlined, and perfected puzzle mechanics. There’s a growing tendency towards abstract, single-serving gameplay that is beginning to define the casual gaming space. One square, two square, red square…red square.
