Game Finished: Newton's Cradle Review

I learned about this game on John Walker's Buried Treasure blog and I feel it is another winner. The basic idea is from those office desk toys where you have a row of balls that can swing and knock into each other according to Newton's laws. In this case the balls are on tracks but the same principle applies. If you knock one ball into a row of balls then only the last one in the row will move. If you use two balls then two balls will move. The goal of the puzzles is to get all the balls onto dots at the end of some tracks, at which point the ball will disappear along with the dot. There are also some white balls that can't move by themselves but can be knocked like all the others. These have to go to special white dots. 

The graphics are pretty minimal. The game looks like it could have come from the DOS era. This felt a bit off-putting at first but kind of grew on me to the point that I liked it by the end.

 One strong point is the soundtrack which is jazzy guitar work. There aren't a whole lot of tracks but they strike a good balance between being interesting musically and being good background.

I feel the puzzles are well designed. As user chadworthy on Steam put it, there isn't any bloat to the mechanics. There are only 32 puzzles and the game doesn't try to do too much. It just does a great job with the basic elements. The puzzles are also economically designed in the sense that there aren't any wasted elements. 

The game is also well worth the price. I got it for 11 NT but the original price is only 22 NT which is less than a dollar. There also seems to be a sale on right now.

As to negatives about the game, I already mentioned that the graphics are a bit off-putting at least at first. Another small complaint is that the puzzles seemed uneven in difficulty. With Hexcells there seemed to be a very smooth progression from easy to difficult. With Newton's Cradle the puzzles seemed kind of randomly arranged with regard to this. Stumpers were mixed with easy ones. I would say it might just be me but according to the other Steam reviews it seemed other users had this same issue. One last issue is the undo feature. I guess Walker was able to convince the developer to add an undo button but it only undoes the last move. It would be nice if it was possible to undo a number of moves.

Two general hints: 1) It is important to remember the fact that if you slide two balls together into some balls (even just one) then two balls will leave. The game doesn't make this obvious and there is one puzzle where I was stumped until I re-read Walker's review.  (I suppose that is another small complaint. The game could have had a tutorial screen for that.) 2) In general it is important to remember that when two balls are in a row and you want to move them you often have a choice. You can slide them together or you can back up the first ball and knock the second one. Remembering this makes a difference in a number of puzzles.