It’s another chance to travel the world through a puzzle game. In World Mosaics, you’ll be assisting Dr Remington in his quest to reveal the mystery of the elusive Pelasgians. This is done by solving mosaics, which is a matter of dusting the tiles of the piece being examined to uncover an image held within. It’s an innovative new puzzle game that structurally takes after minesweeper and sudoku — you have to carefully reveal pieces of the puzzle without touching the fragile empty tiles, based on the information you’re provided from the numbers at the sides of each row and column. It employs a strategy that involves revealing tiles you have the most knowledge of before expanding to further pieces until you’ve eventually uncovered the entire board. World Mosaics is purely logical, and can be solved without any random guessing. The puzzles are challenging enough without being too heavy on the brain.

At the end of every puzzle solved, you’re provided with a snippet of Dr Remington’s diary entries. These form the story, which can be quite educational considering the many references to archaeology, history and mythology. However, the writing does appear forced and lacklustre. The text doesn’t really incite much interest in the story, which is a pity because it seemed to have quite some potential. That probably is the strongest criticism there is, because other than that, the World Mosaics is an incredibly solid puzzle game, refreshing in concept, and capable of being both casual and complex at the same time.

The game is incredibly user-friendly — it does an exceptional task at helping you keep track of your progress on the puzzle, by narrowing down the empty possibilities. You can “flag” tiles that you’re certain contain no mosaics, just by switching over to the shovel tool. For large areas you wish to reveal at once, you can do a simple click-and-drag over that portion on the board. Also, the game automatically crosses out the numbers for the rows and columns which you have already solved.

The screen resolution, unfortunately, is a little low, so if you’re equipped with the latest monitors, you might find the screen a little stretched. But don’t confuse that visual flaw as a fault in the artwork though, which is actually quite pleasant and appropriate for its adventurous theme. World Mosaics is a polished piece, so well-balanced in difficulty that it’s one of the very few puzzle games that you can happily put your mind to after a long, demanding day at work.

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