Patterned

Amazing App, With One Big Problem

Edit: The developers got back to me within two days and helped me fix it completely! I am ridiculously hopeless when it comes to anything techy, but now everything is working properly! I love this app! I love this app! It is so beautiful and calming and I love how all the puzzles are designed by people from all around the world! But I’ve now had it for about a week, and something weird is happening. From the moment I got the app, it has been telling me, every single time I open the app, that my device is not connected to the internet, when I am COMPLETELY sure that it is, and all my other apps work fine. It was still working and wasn’t causing a problem, so I ignored it and kept on playing this wonderful game. Until two days ago, when I opened it and it said the same thing as usual. I thought nothing of it, but then I went to select a new puzzle, and it said that I can only play downloaded puzzles because my device is not connected to the internet. I now only have access to nine of the amazing puzzles, and can’t get it to connect to the internet. I really want to play the other puzzles, but I can’t figure out how to fix it! I even deleted the app and downloaded it again, but the problem is still there. And I’ve checked my internet, and it’s fine! I just really want to play more, but I’m running out of available puzzles!

Relaxing AND challenging!

Pandemic lifesaver:) This app offers variety and two levels so you can relax or be challenged. The gentle music encourages you as you start...just a few notes for each right piece and then continuously as your puzzle gets going. I really like the understated crescendo that happens as you finish the puzzle and celebrate. It is really hard with the repeating ‘wallpaper’ pattern, but that’s what makes it good. You have to focus on very small patterns within the pattern to find each piece’s place. You start with a grayed- out design that blooms into color as you go, or, if that level, becomes stressful just switch to color in the beginning. There are thousands of different puzzles to fit all the many moods of quarantine. There are only two small technical issues I had, but they may also be user error;) When I ‘grab’ a piece to search, my finger covers up the smaller ones so it is hard to maneuver. Sometimes, if I get it just right, I can guide the piece without having my finger right on top of it. My other issue was that when the puzzle is farther along, dragging a piece onto the playing board highlights identical shapes which can give its position away. So, all in all, love it! Really hope we can purchase it at some point instead of having to subscribe to Apple Arcade.

Relaxing, I think

I can’t decide if this game is stressful or not. Really the only thing “bad” that happens if you go too slow is that the music pauses for a bit, but if you go faster and drop a piece into the wrong place it turns red! It’s wrong! Seriously, these are not Big Bad Things. But they still stress me out somewhat. Otherwise the game is beautiful and relaxing and I turn to it several times a day, and have even made wallpaper from some of the finished pieces. My biggest qualm — and I almost took away one star but I didn’t — is with a few certain puzzles where a piece can exactly fit in two different places, (because of the way that particular picture pattern was built, there are no subtle differences in the picture between the two spots), except one placement is arbitrarily WRONG and then I don’t earn a perfect achievement through I-don’t-know -what-fault of my own. Those should be caught before they’re published.

Lovely game, made for righties

I love this game! It’s extremely relaxing, and I think the best part is getting to use each newly solved puzzle as my new background or lock screen on my iPad. It’s ridiculously satisfying to watch the puzzle slowly transition from a black and white sketch to a full color image, and the sketch aspect also adds a degree of difficulty as well. I love being able to look up more puzzles by the same artists, or go randomly. One thing that bothered me was that there is no setting to change the pieces to the left side of the screen. I still have a tendency to use my left hand, and inevitably end up covering pieces with my arm. It would be great if I could choose lefty settings that would make the pieces appear on the right, and cause the pieces to “scoot” to the right when I pick them up. Also, I think it could be made easier to find puzzles you’re working on. I know you can organize all the puzzles into categories, including progress, but I don’t typically work on lots of puzzles at once. It would be easier to just have one “in progress” section where I could store puzzles.

Beautiful art, not enough representation, right-hand biased

Patterned is a lovely game that is soothing to play (if you choose it to be). I have a few quibbles. One is that you cannot move where the unused pieces are, which is not helpful if you are not right-hand dominant or if you just want to switch things up and use a different hand to move the pieces. It would be great if you could have the unused pieces at top, bottom, left or right. I play in landscape mode on my iPad so it may be that playing on a phone or in portrait mode there are more choices. I am increasingly uncomfortable with the Around the World puzzles as I have yet to find one where the person creating the puzzle has listed that region as their own. There is also more representation of white- and light-skinned folks in the puzzles that have humans in them. I would love to see Around the World puzzles focusing on creators from those regions, whether or not their subject matter is of the region, possibly a mix of both. Given the dominance of the Around the World puzzles I think there is an opportunity here to do a better job at representation while keeping the gorgeous art and satisfying game play.

Good game with a maddening issue

This game has good puzzles. Even in sketch mode the puzzles are pretty easy, so I challenge myself to do them without any mistakes. The game, however, has different ideas. If I'm dragging a shape into position, it will sometimes snap out from under my finger or stylus into some other (wrong) place with the same shape. I generally challenge myself a little more by placing all of the multi-square pieces as I encounter them. Then, I place the 15 or so single-square pieces. If I drag a piece too close to an empty square, I have to fight the puzzle to move the piece to where it belongs. I'd prefer the snap to have a proximity potion so out wouldn't snap unless it was close enough, and an option where it wouldn't snap unless the piece was released. I just spent far too much time fighting with a game that's supposed to be relaxing. It also differentiates identical pieces to require correct placement. I've come across this when there are several single square pieces entirely in the background color. Unless they are placed into the correct locations, the puzzle is not considered solved.

Relaxing, but with a flaw in a recent update

After updating to version 3.2, picking up pieces after putting them down in the wrong place on the puzzle has a rather annoying problem: when I tap and hold on a loose piece, it slides out from under my fingertip, about a block and a half to the left. The piece will move around as I move my finger and drop when I let go so it isn't completely breaking the game, but it is disconcerting when I want a puzzle to be relaxing. Update: Apparently this is a feature, not a bug. Thank you, developers, for responding to this review! I can see what you're going for here, but please, please, try a different way to do it. Right now picking up a puzzle piece only to have it scoot out from under my finger feels like trying to stab a fork into the last cherry tomato on a salad plate. Maybe you could make any tap inside the puzzle area pick up the loose piece, so I could choose how far away my finger was from the piece and that distance would stay constant the whole time? Or just make this an optional feature?

It should be relaxing but it’s confusing and frustrating.

So, the big problem, for me, is that it’s a repeating pattern, literally like wallpaper. Except, the area you are allowed to use is just in the center and, for reasons I don’t understand, there can be a perfectly viable place to drag your “colored piece” to and it won’t go there. Sometimes it matches perfectly in 3 places. But, nope those are the wrong places, it’s the 4th identical image that’s the correct one. The grayed out image is dim and hard to make out details, and the “colors’ are pretty muted, so, sometimes. You can’t even tell if you’ve “colored’ an area or not. Essentially this is a new kind of coloring book with a puzzle element, but, I have no idea why they don’t just have one image like an actual puzzle/coloring book, instead of using the continuous wallpaper style. If I were to give the developers notes I’d say, less watery, washed out colors, and a single image instead of coloring 50 wallpaper flowers. Some of the puzzles I enjoyed were of villages and shops, and, although they repeated, I felt more invested in putting a larger theme together.

Great game but with flaws on Apple TV

First off, this game is wonderful and I love it; one of my faves on Arcade. It’s chill, beautiful, calming, somewhat mindless fun and I really enjoy it on my phone and iPad. However, on Apple TV it is terrible. Using the remote to grab and place pieces is really tricky and made worse by not knowing which piece you are grabbing. The opacity of the piece you’re on before clicking is like 5% darker than the rest, at best, so when you get down to the smallest pieces it’s truly a crapshoot and the puzzles take probably 3x longer than they should because of the poor UI. A simple outline over the piece you’re on or a slow shaking movement would do the trick so maybe an update will include this and hopefully scrolling through the list gets ironed out as it’s not smooth, same can be said for navigating the menus. It’s a bummer as it looks beautiful on the big screen with Apple TV, but I won’t be playing there any longer until they figure out a better UI. Great work, but keep up the great work and fix the Apple TV version.

I want to like it…

This should be a relaxing game. It has chill music… no timer to make you feel rushed… but unfortunately actually playing the game is weirdly frustrating. To start, the thumbnails are often misleading as to what the actual puzzle will look like. A clear, defined thumbnail often turns out to be fussy and packed with mixed proportion details that repeat multiple times with apparent minor coloration changes which of course can’t be seen. Maybe I need to visit the optometrist, but on some puzzles the pallet is so washed out it is hard to tell where/if pieces have already been placed or the resolution is so poor you can’t make out details. On many puzzles, placing one piece fills in multiple, identical details… BUT! there is only ONE CORRECT placement of the piece!?!?! How are the other locations “wrong” if they are identical and will auto-fill when you place the piece? I like the concept, but the effort to keep it from being ‘too easy’ often turns it into a game of ‘chance’ instead of ‘skill’

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