One Hundred Ways Demo

Puzzle games are destined to give your mind a workout, but it’s not enough to punish the players with unsolvable riddles. Instead, the overall experience must be both fun and difficult at the same time, in order to incentivize the players to keep going, or even replay the game multiple times. It’s obviously not an easy task, but it has been done many times in the past.

One Hundred Ways is a puzzle game in which you have to guide a ball to the green flag and overcome a variety of obstacles along the way. Each level features a maze of traps you need to figure out and bypass, but there is usually a large collection of gadgets at your disposal. These can be combined and used to get over any kind of annoyance, although you still need to use your brain.

The first couple of levels introduce you to the mechanics, but it’s quite simple to understand how everything works. Once you press play, the ball starts rolling and there’s no way to stop it, so everything has to be planned out beforehand. There are trampolines that make the ball jump, portals that teleport the ball to a different location, and many other such items that come in handy.

Since you only have a few items of every kind in your inventory at the start of a level, it is vital that you place them in the perfect spot, otherwise you won’t make it. Granted, they can be easily repositioned if you misplace one by mistake, but only when the ball is not rolling. Thankfully, the difficulty curve is quite smooth, which means that you get plenty of time to accommodate with every gadget.

Interface-wise, the game is played from an isometric point of view, but the engine is fully three-dimensional. Hence, you can zoom in and move the camera around to get a better look at the maze, but there are problems in this regard. The camera movement is way too slow and sloppy, which makes it a bother to move around the stage and assess the layout of the traps.

One Hundred Ways could use a bit of work when it comes to the interface and camera control, but everything else is pretty much spot on. It’s not a particularly original game, and maybe not that difficult for most puzzle aficionados, but you can still have a great time with it.