So many games, and so little time to cover them all!  

Between the site’s scheduling and the amount of great looking indie titles releasing every month, there sometimes just isn’t time to shine a detailed spotlight on every single one of them. As such, our QuickShot reviews are designed to provide smaller bitesized reviews on a few other releases along with some footage of it in action!

Many thanks to Frozax Games for the review code.

Tents and Trees styles itself as a cross between Picross and Minesweeper, and it really does succeed at making a pretty solid combination of both. Appearing at first glance to be a simple Picross clone, you are given a square grid with numbers around the side that represents how many tents are in that row or column. The goal is to place the tents as appropriate, and reap the rewards.

What makes this different to the usual nonogram is the inclusion of trees and the rules that you have to follow to solve the puzzle. Tents have to be placed directly next to a tree either vertically or horizontally, and cannot be touching a tent in any direction. Using these rules, you can eliminate dud spots by placing empty grass in the relevant place and then using your noggin to figure out where the tents are placed.

It’s a neat little variation that proves to be instantly intuitive yet also challenging enough to get absolutely brutal in the later stages. With hundreds of levels available with differing sizes and even challenging variants that hide some of the numbers, there’s a lot of content here to satisfy both casual and hardcore puzzle fans alike.

VERDICT
Whilst the core concept isn’t groundbreaking enough to win any awards, it’s still unique enough for puzzle fans to dip into for something that feels different to what they’re used to and still scratch that same itch. Its relaxing music and pleasant visual style complement the casual nature of the game, but it’ll still be able to test even puzzle veterans.