Passage 4 Demo

Holiday-themed video games are not a novelty, but they can still get you in the right mood whenever you feel like you lack the holiday spirit for some reason. Obviously, casual games work best in this case, because there’s not a lot of point in developing a triple-A production just to provide people with something to play on Christmas or Easter.

Passage 4 is a challenging puzzle game with a few basic rules, in which your goal is to place tiles on a board in such a way as to obtain complete rows and columns in order to clear them. These tiles have to match the ones adjacent to them in order to be placed, either when it comes to color, or the symbol on them. It’s fairly simple at first, but it quickly gets tough due to the many available colors and symbols.

There are multiple game modes to choose from as well, but the differences are not that great. In essence, some of the modes force you to deal with time limits as well, so you have to create a path before time runs out or it’s game over. You can also pick from multiple difficulty modes, depending on how experienced you are with the game and whether you are in for a challenge or not.

Although the Christmas theme is a good choice this time of the year, the gimmick gets old and repetitive later on. Thankfully, you can opt to change the symbols on the tiles to something else, such as animals or various other things. It’s a great way to avoid boredom, but then again the mechanics remain the same, so it’s not a foolproof solution in any case.

As for the graphics, there’s not much to talk about, given the fact that all you see is a basic board and the tiles themselves. There’s not much artwork either, although this could have been a good medium to provide the players with some nice backgrounds. Thankfully, at least the music is quite joyful and relaxing, which is great if you plan on taking it easy on the holidays.

When it’s all said and done, Passage 4 can easily keep you busy for a few hours, depending how much of a puzzle fan you are. Moreover, it doesn’t take long to understand the rules, but it takes a while to get good at it and see all the possible solutions on the board.