A Lights Out-Style Puzzler That Has No Plan B
I used to live in a bedsit that was a bit like Gridz Keeper. When you switched on the light in the downstairs bathroom, the upstairs bathroom would turn on too. It was a nightmare when two of you were trying to have a wee at the same time.
It seems that the same electrician managed to survive the zombie apocalypse. In Gridz Keeper, you are getting the power back online at an electrical grid, but the wiring is skew-whiff. Flipping one switch causes the surrounding switches to activate. Rather than rewire and make things easier for the next post-apocalyptic electrician that comes along, you have to keep flipping switches until all lights are on.
It makes Gridz Keeper a simple old puzzle game. We’ve played similar versions in hidden object games and the odd action-adventure. Imagine a 3×3 grid of levers. If you pull the top-left lever, it not only activates itself but the levers below and to the right of it. The central lever activates all of the levers in a cross pattern. In Gridz Keeper, the aim is to activate all levers, turning them from red to green.
Less Thought, More Random Lever Pulling
I’m probably telling on myself here, but I have always taken a scattergun approach to these puzzles. I will randomly flip switches until a pattern emerges that I know how to deal with. Ah, I’ve made a cross-shape. I know what to do now. I’m about as artful as a bull in a puzzle shop.
I’m sure there’s a mathematical, systematic approach to solving these puzzles. The problem is, by the time I might have planned it out on paper, I could have solved it by randomly twiddling things. It’s always been my problem with these puzzles: they may be exquisitely constructed, but I will undermine it by yanking everything in sight.
So, we come to Gridz Keeper, a game solely about these puzzles. You can probably imagine how it went.
I played it as intended in the first half. The levels are either tutorials that need a single switch to solve, or are so simple that stumbling upon a solution is incredibly likely. The grids in the opening half of the game are small, sometimes as tiny as 1×4. It’s possible to get to level 25 – halfway through Gridz Keeper – in ten minutes flat.
In the second half, things got sketchier. Suddenly we were in 3×3 grids, or weird bastardisations of them, with offshoot switches that toggled themselves or one other. Kudos to Gridz Keeper and developers Double Mizzlee that they don’t wheel out the same grids for each layout. It would have been easier to do so, and so, so much worse as a result.
It was in this second half that I dusted off the old tactics. I’d pull a lever randomly to see if the resulting pattern was easy to solve, and then start the process again. In almost every instance, this would lead to a solution in three or four pulls. In two instances, I was stuck pulling levers for five minutes. That’s randomness for you.
Short Circuit
If that sounds like it would total a short period of time, you’d be correct. From start to finish, Gridz Keeper took 25 minutes to complete. Fifty levels, each averaging thirty seconds. For a budget price that may seem reasonable, but I lean towards it being slight. We barely got comfy in our armchair before Gridz Keeper was finished.
It’s not hard to imagine how Gridz Keeper could have been more substantial. It could demand that you complete puzzles in a set or limited number of moves. A second mode that applied limits, or star-rankings for swift completions, would have ticked a box nicely. Equally, some extra mechanics would have livened things up. Switches that break the rules, toggling all of the corner switches, for example, would at least have stopped to make us think.
Who Brought The Zombies?
That’s without even mentioning the zombies – responsible for the z in the title. They don’t factor into Gridz Keeper at all. Presumably, someone has realised that crowbarring zombies into a game or title will double sales. Because they don’t even have the courtesy of shambling in the background. They stand, stock still, watching my terrible puzzle skills. I was longing for the lights to come on, the gates to open, and a spot of shootery to take place. It might have raised the pulse.
It’s the problem that Gridz Keeper can’t leapfrog over. Why do we need a compendium of this kind of puzzle? Without turn-limits, they’re easy to brute force and – at least in my case – it was too tempting not to. Something needed to be stirred in to make it worthwhile: another genre, perhaps, or additional mechanics. But Gridz Keeper is nobly (and unwisely) resolved to offer Lights Out-style puzzles, and only Lights Out-style puzzles.
Random Lever Pulling
There might be someone who adores these puzzles and painstakingly solves them in the shortest number of moves possible. But we haven’t met them, and Gridz Keeper does a disappointing job of serving them anyway.
For anyone else, Gridz Keeper is 25-minutes of random lever pulling and the odd jolt of satisfaction when a puzzle is solved. If we’re honest, we’d rather spend that time head-shotting undead hordes in a more conventional zombie game.
Important Links
Gridz Keeper Switches On A Zombie-Fuelled Puzzle Challenge – https://www.thexboxhub.com/gridz-keeper-switches-on-a-zombie-fuelled-puzzle-challenge/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/gridz-keeper/9p657sjvmdgr
