The minds behind Cracking the Cryptic are absolute geniuses. The puzzles are VERY, VERY innovative and fun to play (thanks to all of it being handcrafted, rather than generated), with lots of variety in gamemodes and difficulty. Even with the free content available, it is still challenging enough to keep you engaged for the time being.

This is an amazing Sudoku game for enthusiasts of all levels, even for beginners as well. With more updates and puzzles being added to this game, I will definitely see myself going back to this a lot.


I do have some criticisms for this game, but bear in mind, these problems are very minuscule. It will not impact the gameplay at all, it will not affect the enjoyment you get from this game, but it would be nice if these issues are considered.

• There aren't any customisable key-binds for this game, and the controls list aren't quite as obvious to figure out in this game. I would prefer if the controls list was in a different tab in the menu.
  
  
• Guides and Rulebook in this game is very limited, I suppose it's due to most of the work being put on creating more puzzles instead, which is understandable. Currently, there are only guides and rules for "Dominoes" sudoku, which I hope to see being expanded on later in the future.
  
  
• Guides and rules are very hard to read. I suppose that's partially on me for not being able to read plain text and pay attention for too long (lol gen Zs) but I did see some rule-books have nice formatting to it (with pictures, indexing and stuffs). I would love to see guides and rule-books be formatted more nicely and easier to read.

And for the gameplay itself:

• I would prefer if the game has the "check" button like the web app. If your intention was to help us complete the game from start to finish and let us figure out the mistakes itself, that's fine, but the check button helped me confirm my suspicions when I got confused at a certain stage. That would save me more time than going to settings and turning on "show all mistakes", lol.
  
  
• The "check duplicates" errors works fine already, but is it possible to make it work like the web app as well? Where if you noted down an invalid number, it would highlight the number as well.

Thanks a lot for reading this review. If you like it, give it a like for visibility (or not if you think it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥)