Casual Review

Full Review

Have you started ignoring all the news in the newspaper and flipping straight to the back of the paper? Have you sighed to yourself, thinking, “Oh, if only there could be a newspaper with nothing but Sudoku, how glorious that would be.” Well, my fellow Sudoku addict, we have just the game for you. Newspaper Puzzle Challenge has everything a Sudoku fan could ask for – 49,000 puzzles and variations, plus an infinite number of crossword puzzles that can be generated on the spot. Does Inertia know how to feed an addiction or what?

The game’s graphics are simple and appropriate – a big newspaper filled with games. You select any of the seven sudoku variations or the crossword puzzle from the front cover of The Inertia Express, and it flips open to reveal your game. The variations such as Giant Sudoku and Kakuro are a fun change from the regular sudoku, although they can take a little while to get used to. At times the game was also confusing because some of the sub-games weren’t well explained.

The games have no time limit and there’s no punishment for not completing a puzzle. Once you solve your first puzzle, you can attempt the Puzzle Challenges – 20 games that once solved give you a new puzzle booklet. The games, which include titles like Wild Goose Chase and Death by Numbers, get progressively harder and must be completed in order.

Sudoku translates well to a computer game. By left-clicking on a box, you can select the number you want to use from a notepad that pops up on the screen. Right-clicking will allow you to click on any numbers you think are possibilities, a helpful tool that some online sudoku versions lack. Sometimes the notepad was unresponsive, and the numbers I clicked didn’t show up, but that was easily remedied by changing the options to use the keypad instead. Another neat feature they wisely included is the ability to print any puzzle out and finish it on the go, helping you avoid going into Sudoku withdrawal when you leave your computer.

Beware, this game is not for the faint of heart – it’s surprisingly challenging even on the easy difficulty settings. But with thousands of new puzzles to play, you can easily skip one and continue to the next. And just think, after a few months of this game, you’ll be finishing sudoku puzzles with a five-star difficulty and the New York Times’ Sunday crossword puzzle in no time flat!

Review by Sara Schweid