It’s 1100 AD and a plucky mathematician asked the question of whether you can move the knight chess piece around a board in its traditional ‘L’ shape formation and hit every square once and only once. The answer is yes and mathematicians and keeno’s throughout history have adapted this problem to make it evey more challenging by changing the aspects of the chess board and creating a closed loop in which you can start from any point on the board, finish and start again. Sounds like a programmer’s wet dream, kind of, well at least it was for Phillipe FUNK the creator of Sukeima – The Quest, the puzzle app which incorporates the rules of the knight’s tour with the ancient art of Go, Chess and Sudoku.
This heavily Japanese influenced game has attempted to take the artful strategies of the culturally cherished game Go and mix it up with the colourful and addictive qualities of apps such as Candy Crush in an effort to make mind expanding puzzle games fun, fast paced and exciting.
I’ll admit that I’m not altogether sold on the result given that the developer has chosen to take the path of having essential in-app purchases and a bombardment of timed advertorials but if you can look past that then the initial idea is good and probably the reason that Sukeima has been nominated in both the Best Mobile App Awards the the SB App Awards.
Soft water colour paintings serve as the backdrop to Sukeima’s world of puzzles and your job will be to traverse the lands, complete the 100+ levels and collect the gemstones to become a Sukeima master. You’ll do all this with the helpful, albeit somewhat annoying help of your cute manga-like owl guide, who’ll giggle with glee at each triumph or take the odd snooze if it thinks you’re taking too long.
One of the apps features that I liked was the ability to keep track of your friends scores by having a profile so that you can compete amongst yourselves, this lends the game a nice, social aspect and helps to keep it entertaining.
If you’d like to take a stab at this age old puzzle then download Sukeima from the App Store or Google Play today!
