#sudokuvania digits of despair

[wirewitchviolet]

Sudokuvania: Digits of Despair is one of the most impressive works of pure game design I have ever seen.

Before I say anything else, I am going to be talking about a game that is VERY new and has pretty terrible search optimization, so in case this blog post somehow came up near the top of results for someone, here is the as-of-this-writing-current 1.02 release, and for good measure, here is the official FAQ page with the full version history, any future patches, and an FAQ for some of the more confusingly worded stuff that crops up later into the game. Now on with the praise-heaping!

So... Sudokuvania pretty much exactly what the name implies. It's a -vania, that is, a Metroidvania, and specifically one styled after one of the ones that's actually in the latter Castlevania series so that naming convention actually makes sense. Exploring a big castle, fighting bosses, getting various items letting you explore more areas, maybe breaking out of the borders of the map to find cool secrets here and there.

Also, it's a variant of sudoku. And I don't mean someone sat down with some videogame designing toolkit and made a videogame where some of the gameplay is solving logic puzzles on a grid you fill with numbers (I mean, I guess technically I do). I mean that link to the game I posted takes you to a website with a little built in standard app for solving sudoku puzzles and weird variations thereof, and the particular puzzle it's pointing to, somehow, manages to have a big map to explore, boss fights, special items that give you new powers, NPCs, and for good measure, fog of war. It is, again, an absolutely amazing hacky thing and I'm flabbergasted at how well executed it is. Now you're probably wondering how that even works, and that's why I'm writing this big gushy blog post. Here's what you see when you first load it up:

You're going to notice there is some absurdly small and kind of important text you can't possibly read, and that's because again, this is kind of a hacky thing this site so was not designed for. So it's kind of annoying but if you access this through the proper introduction page, it'll explain that the first thing you need to do is click the little gear icon in the floating tool palette, toggle on Visuals: Draw arrows above lines and Disable emoji replacement, then scroll all the way down to Experimental and turn on Test Large Puzzle UI. That enables you to zoom in and out with the scroll wheel, and right-click drag to pan around. It's... a little clunky because again, this website was NOT built for this, but tada, now you can zoom in, read the text, and start solving at a reasonable size. Then there's a couple gameplay concepts it does its best to explain, but... most people I've shown it to myself included needed extra explanation of a couple important early concepts. So let me just do a little color coding here to make this easier to get...

The map is not, in fact, one great big grid. It's 9 squares (and one rectangle that's not quite square over on the east side). Each of these is its own 9x9 Sudoku grid (well, the starting one is 6x6 and has those mutant 2x3 cells instead of the usual 3x3, and there's that weird eastern mutant). If you're solving stuff in one square, you completely ignore everything outside that square, except for where they overlap, in which case the numbers you're placing have to fit for both puzzles. So if we look at the light grey/green intersection on the left, those three overlap cells respectively can't be 4 6 or 5 (and whatever use you deduce in the grey box, but the pure green cells completely ignore all that, you're just focusing on the green 9x9 (which is going to have the overlap as a starting point, naturally).

The next bit that through me off a ton is the way fog of war works. Let me reasonably zoom in and do a little solving here. One second...

Here's the whole starting area all marked up to hell like you do when you're kinda bad at Sudoku and don't know how to spot a starting point. Penciling in little numbers in the corners. You'll also notice a that... most of the map is covered in this dark grey fog of war. A lot of in-game stuff mentions that you shouldn't go clicking out into the fog of war, because it'll show you names of later areas and preview certain special rules and all, but that's talking about clicking WAY off from what you can see. You are 100% allowed to solve stuff out in the fog of war, and it's pretty stingy about de-fogging. Don't go blindly guessing because then you can maybe end up sequence breaking but... yeah. Sorry I'm spoiling the Front Gate, it's basically the tutorial though. Anyway, first move is obvious, only one place we can put that 6, and suddenly...

Tada, important space so it rewarded us with a little fog clearing. You can also see that this will handily point out stuff in your pencil notes that can't be true, but only if A- it's untrue for standard sudoku reasons not special stuff, and B- it's not in the fog of war (or on the other side of some. You also maybe noticed that weird green thing under that first hint 6? That's something we need a tool for, you don't worry about it until you have that tool. Solving this out some more...

Little more de-fogging, both of the puzzle area and the margins where we're getting new information on playing the game in general. Now right here if you're observant, you'll see that bottom right corner has to be a 6. It's out in the fog of war, but you can mark it if you know what it is. And...

I was cropping it out before but the big purple number pad is always floating off to the side there, and the green text box over it, which among other things has an area name and flavor text for whatever grid you're in. This won't ALWAYS happen when you place numbers in fog of war, but there was a trigger on this 6 to load in a little piece of the first real area, and oh hey, we unlocked "Guide THERMO!" That's our first tool, and it's described up in the upper left.

So tada, from here out in addition to standard sudoku stuff, you've got these "bronze Guide THERMOs" that show up here and there and have this extra rule. You basically never get free numbers in the grid past the Front Gate, it's all slow-marching into new areas using what you're bringing in plus some easy starting examples of how your new tools work, plowing on from there. The fog of war is pretty stingy but it keeps you focused. You'll also notice the rules here mention bosses, all the 9x9 ones have one. It's clearly marked, and you should PROBABLY expose it from the fog first, but any time you're in the area really you, if you scroll around in that green text box or hit the rules button when in a grid, there's a link you can click to go fight it. The boss fights are all separate puzzles (site's good about auto-saving so don't freak out if it takes over your tab and you have to hit back after). These are very themey, sometimes VERY evil (especially boss #1, feels a bit overtuned) self-contained 9x9 puzzles, probably using the same tools their area is themed around, and I don't think there's a single pre-placed number in any of them. Beat the boss puzzle, it gives you some flavor text and a number to place in its cell back in the main castle puzzle, plug that in and you're always going to unlock something cool. Usually a new item, sometimes other weird stuff, and it just goes on like that.

Don't expect to be able to fully solve a given grid in one go. It's a Metroidvania, backtracking is expected. Even if you've fully de-fogged a grid, later stuff might reward you by straight up adding new symbols you couldn't see before or doing weird stuff with fog. It IS all solvable with pure logic... but there ARE a few places that do that thing I hate in tougher sudokus where you just kinda have to pencil in in a different faction and explore 2 possible futures for a bit to see which eventually contradicts itself. And of course the last couple of grids do some really evil mind-bendy stuff.

But yeah aside from a couple gripes where the way a tool works could maybe be a lot more grammatically clear, that first boss being a lot to deal with as you're first getting your feet wet, and a particularly cruel twist later on, I don't really have any complaints. Well, it might need a cool soundtrack. Maybe play some Castlevania music. Maybe switch it up for some real proper boss music when you're nearing victory.

Again I am just completely blown away that someone made something so meaty in a standard sudoku site's normal UI, and really managed to make it feel so much like playing a DS Castlevania. Some real proof of game design being an art form here. And now you too can just completely lose a day or two to it!

[boxkeith]

Video Games I Played in May 2025

I have a bad habit when looking at the month to “round up” and consider things closed early. The 21st is basically the end, and it’s easy to see the last third as dregs rather than just as large as either half of what had come before. Maybe that’s just the natural ebb and flow of things to chunk time up and discard it flippantly, but I need to be more proactive about trying things or starting new projects without needing a clean dividing line. If nothing else I need to stop giving myself shit for only having done half as much as a typical month when I’m halfway through the month.

Trine 5 – Trine as a series reminds me a lot of Shantae in that damn near all of them are 6/10 unremarkable timewasters, but I keep fucking playing them. Someone could play the first Trine five times and have an experience about on par with running the gamut. That being said, this is definitely the most polished and refined the experience has ever been of tri-character puzzle platforming with physics objects, though they still haven’t solved the issue that “summon plank as wizard, move with telekinesis, grapple to plank as thief” will get you past 90% of puzzles. Maybe it’s more of an endeavor in multiplayer.

Sudokuvania: Digits of Despair – I’m trying to give more small games a shot, and I’ve been on a tile puzzle kick lately with all the picross and minesweeper. What this really taught me is that I’m dogshit at sudoku. I can do a decent job of running through the counterfactuals to derive fractional information and iterate that way, but even then I was faltering rapidly. It didn’t help the site’s UI was clearly not designed for a game of this complexity, and a standalone release with its own engine (and clearer rules text) would definitely pique my interest. Link - https://sudokupad.app/qq3kyjvu5q?setting-nogrid=1&setting-largepuzzle=1

Cosmobreeder Yiffai – I swear I bought this game entirely on its merits as a challenging metroidvania that’s taking heavily from Metroid 1 and Metal Gear in its level design and mechanics. Pay no attention to the several dozen GB of furry porn I’ve been steadily accruing over the past 15 years. I played with the NSFW patch provided by the creator, but even the base game is far from subtle in its lewd overtones. It’s a rare cross-section that’s both willing to navigate that tone and also its backbreaking precision platforming, but it’s a refreshingly novel experience that I recommend highly. That being said I’m not reviewing it on Steam because my uncle is friends with me and although I know he read Heavy Metal religiously in his 20s I don’t think he’s THAT down to party.

Hatsune Miku Logic Paint S – I miss Khimera: Puzzle Island. It’s hard to fuck up picross but somehow this game managed it, and moreover it primarily failed in the music and sound design. It’s a Miku game! Miku is right there! Why does the music suck? Why does ever tile make a click when you mouse over it so it’s a constant overstimulating jackhammer? Questions abound.

Kingdom Hearts III + Re:Mind – As I write this review “Crawling” by Linkin Park is blasting from my speakers. It is 1AM. I cannot and will not pretend to have truly moved beyond 2006. Kingdom Hearts is a subject about which I could write a sizeable book, and if one were to sum all the conversations, 4chan arguments, and ephemera I’ve had on the subject it’d probably dwarf most other topics. Despite that, I cannot particularly pin down how I feel about KH3. This is my first time playing it since release, and it runs beautifully on my PC. I’ve put 50 hours into the damn thing in under a month, and I can’t tell if my reticence to finish it is burnout, a desire to explore every iota of its world and systems, or dread for the endless overwrought cutscenes and shattered pacing that faces me in the Keyblade Graveyard. I could spend another ten hours level grinding further and trying to get ultima weapon, or I could spend that time playing three new indie games and encountering new ideas. I still need to replay TWEWY.

Proverbs – In much the same way that a museum curator’s control of gallery layout, lighting, and framing can either enhance or ruin a piece, the real majesty of a puzzle game is in its menu. Some are a muted level select screen, perhaps with light motifs that echo the puzzles themselves like Polimines displaying levels cleared with mistakes with the same shade of green as a clicked mine. Others such as Talos Principle make the level select a part of a metapuzzle, freely borrowing elements that transcend their assumed boundaries. Proverbs would be unremarkable as a series of a hundred or so minesweeper maps, but woven as they are into an overarching painting gives them a sense of scale and progress that is deliciously tangible. The satisfying click of tile colors and the flow from a lack of true failstates also helps.

Revenge of the Savage Planet – Academically I understand why there’s very few FPS metroidvanias. A genre that is defined primarily in the feeling of “you cannot do that, YET” needs to be hyperaware of what information is available to the player and conveying that in a 3D environment in first person is begging for a player to miss out on something. To this extent, I’m glad that this team took another bite at the apple after Journey to the Savage Planet, which was merely fine. I respected its willingness to steal the Metroid Prime scan visor, but everything in the first game was shallow mechanically and its story/setting were overly reliant on Spumco-style grossout humor and hypercommerical satire. The sequel doesn’t really elevate or evolve anything presented in the first game, and so I got bored after a few hours.

Satisfactory – I only “played” an hour of this in my latest replay, so I’ll mostly take this as an opportunity to bitch about Nvidia’s absolutely godawful drivers. I’m okay with the occasional crash for a complex game with robust autosaves, but this was crashing every couple seconds despite running like a dream a year ago on the same PC. I’m going to come back to this because many of the 1.0 changes are very interesting, but for now my experience was far from satisfactory.

The Siege and the Sandfox – I have a lot of fondness for the Sands of Time trilogy. I’ve played them extensively and think about them often. When I saw a new metroidvania that was drinking heavily from that well, I was intrigued. Sadly the result was abysmal, for a variety of reasons that ultimately come down to lack of willingness to commit to a style of play. As a platformer, it fails due to its clumsy and imprecise controls, lack of player tools for meaningfully correcting mistakes (no dagger to bail you out here), and atrocious checkpoint placement. As a stealth game it also suffers from all of these but also poor enemy AI with frequent glitches and dodgy hitboxes for detection and sneak attacks. What really twisted the knife was the narration which was clearly intended as an homage to Scheherazade but instead comes across as someone breathlessly doing a Farah impression with wooden delivery, played on repeat as dying resets every voiceline that you’d triggered since the last checkpoint. Maybe if I hadn’t had a phenomenal time with The Lost Crown recently I’d be less dour, but I don’t think anything short of a full redesign would save this.

Enshrouded – I’m not terribly keen on openworldsurvivalcraft as a genre but it’s slim pickings looking for things with online co-op that are literally anything else. The emphasis on structured content and NPC quests is interesting, but the inconsistency of what accomplishments are shared across co-op and which ones require player proximity makes it very frustrating to divide and conquer. Overall I think I prefer it slightly to Valheim, but I’ve also played it a third as much so we’ll see how stale it is in 30 hours.

Dragonsweeper – Another small free game ( https://danielben.itch.io/dragonsweeper ). Clever minesweeper with a variety of complex and unspoken rules about monster placement and tendencies. I’m still not sure to what degree luck is required to beat the game and it definitely felt rather prescribed in what solutions were available for any given seed, but it was a fun afternoon poking at it and discussing it with other people I linked it to.

Janosik – I’m genuinely not sure how I find these. I think I ran into the sequel while trawling for metroidvanias and was charmed by its presentation, and decided to play this one first. It’s a short free platformer and while I wouldn’t say it won my heart in the same way as Khimera: Destroy All Monstergirls I enjoyed jumping around hitting people with a sword.

Janosik 2 – It’s got a 2 on the end which means it’s twice as long. I’m not the biggest fan of character-swapping games as opposed to consolidating the abilities, especially when the party never splits and the game never forces you to use one subset of tools over another. Moonlight Pulse was especially good about asking the player interesting questions about how their toolkits intersected, whereas this is a fairly straightforward romp the entire way through. There’s some light backtracking through levels for completionists but nothing about the game is particularly difficult. It’s a charming and inexpensive platformer that doesn’t overstay its welcome, and that’s more than enough to be worth my time.

Cursed to Golf – I don’t particularly like golf games, and I won’t pretend I gave this a fair shake. I got this because steam sale weirdness meant it was cheaper to buy a game I actually wanted alongside it rather than buy that game directly. I didn’t make it out of the tutorial because they introduced a card resource that I could use to modify my shot in various ways. I was moderately interested in a golf-based Jump King, but I don’t need resource mechanics and other chaff on top of that when I’m feeling borderline already.

[catgirl-soup]

I 100%ed this sudoku, and it was legitimately like playing a full videogame. It was incredible.

If you're into variant sudoku, particularly of the difficult variety, I highly HIGHLY recommend

Sudokuvania: Digits of Despair is one of the most impressive works of pure game design I have ever seen.

Before I say anything else, I am going to be talking about a game that is VERY new and has pretty terrible search optimization, so in case this blog post somehow came up near the top of results for someone, here is the as-of-this-writing-current 1.02 release, and for good measure, here is the official FAQ page with the full version history, any future patches, and an FAQ for some of the more confusingly worded stuff that crops up later into the game. Now on with the praise-heaping!

So... Sudokuvania pretty much exactly what the name implies. It's a -vania, that is, a Metroidvania, and specifically one styled after one of the ones that's actually in the latter Castlevania series so that naming convention actually makes sense. Exploring a big castle, fighting bosses, getting various items letting you explore more areas, maybe breaking out of the borders of the map to find cool secrets here and there.

Also, it's a variant of sudoku. And I don't mean someone sat down with some videogame designing toolkit and made a videogame where some of the gameplay is solving logic puzzles on a grid you fill with numbers (I mean, I guess technically I do). I mean that link to the game I posted takes you to a website with a little built in standard app for solving sudoku puzzles and weird variations thereof, and the particular puzzle it's pointing to, somehow, manages to have a big map to explore, boss fights, special items that give you new powers, NPCs, and for good measure, fog of war. It is, again, an absolutely amazing hacky thing and I'm flabbergasted at how well executed it is. Now you're probably wondering how that even works, and that's why I'm writing this big gushy blog post. Here's what you see when you first load it up:

You're going to notice there is some absurdly small and kind of important text you can't possibly read, and that's because again, this is kind of a hacky thing this site so was not designed for. So it's kind of annoying but if you access this through the proper introduction page, it'll explain that the first thing you need to do is click the little gear icon in the floating tool palette, toggle on Visuals: Draw arrows above lines and Disable emoji replacement, then scroll all the way down to Experimental and turn on Test Large Puzzle UI. That enables you to zoom in and out with the scroll wheel, and right-click drag to pan around. It's... a little clunky because again, this website was NOT built for this, but tada, now you can zoom in, read the text, and start solving at a reasonable size. Then there's a couple gameplay concepts it does its best to explain, but... most people I've shown it to myself included needed extra explanation of a couple important early concepts. So let me just do a little color coding here to make this easier to get...

The map is not, in fact, one great big grid. It's 9 squares (and one rectangle that's not quite square over on the east side). Each of these is its own 9x9 Sudoku grid (well, the starting one is 6x6 and has those mutant 2x3 cells instead of the usual 3x3, and there's that weird eastern mutant). If you're solving stuff in one square, you completely ignore everything outside that square, except for where they overlap, in which case the numbers you're placing have to fit for both puzzles. So if we look at the light grey/green intersection on the left, those three overlap cells respectively can't be 4 6 or 5 (and whatever use you deduce in the grey box, but the pure green cells completely ignore all that, you're just focusing on the green 9x9 (which is going to have the overlap as a starting point, naturally).

The next bit that through me off a ton is the way fog of war works. Let me reasonably zoom in and do a little solving here. One second...

Here's the whole starting area all marked up to hell like you do when you're kinda bad at Sudoku and don't know how to spot a starting point. Penciling in little numbers in the corners. You'll also notice a that... most of the map is covered in this dark grey fog of war. A lot of in-game stuff mentions that you shouldn't go clicking out into the fog of war, because it'll show you names of later areas and preview certain special rules and all, but that's talking about clicking WAY off from what you can see. You are 100% allowed to solve stuff out in the fog of war, and it's pretty stingy about de-fogging. Don't go blindly guessing because then you can maybe end up sequence breaking but... yeah. Sorry I'm spoiling the Front Gate, it's basically the tutorial though. Anyway, first move is obvious, only one place we can put that 6, and suddenly...

Tada, important space so it rewarded us with a little fog clearing. You can also see that this will handily point out stuff in your pencil notes that can't be true, but only if A- it's untrue for standard sudoku reasons not special stuff, and B- it's not in the fog of war (or on the other side of some. You also maybe noticed that weird green thing under that first hint 6? That's something we need a tool for, you don't worry about it until you have that tool. Solving this out some more...

Little more de-fogging, both of the puzzle area and the margins where we're getting new information on playing the game in general. Now right here if you're observant, you'll see that bottom right corner has to be a 6. It's out in the fog of war, but you can mark it if you know what it is. And...

I was cropping it out before but the big purple number pad is always floating off to the side there, and the green text box over it, which among other things has an area name and flavor text for whatever grid you're in. This won't ALWAYS happen when you place numbers in fog of war, but there was a trigger on this 6 to load in a little piece of the first real area, and oh hey, we unlocked "Guide THERMO!" That's our first tool, and it's described up in the upper left.

So tada, from here out in addition to standard sudoku stuff, you've got these "bronze Guide THERMOs" that show up here and there and have this extra rule. You basically never get free numbers in the grid past the Front Gate, it's all slow-marching into new areas using what you're bringing in plus some easy starting examples of how your new tools work, plowing on from there. The fog of war is pretty stingy but it keeps you focused. You'll also notice the rules here mention bosses, all the 9x9 ones have one. It's clearly marked, and you should PROBABLY expose it from the fog first, but any time you're in the area really you, if you scroll around in that green text box or hit the rules button when in a grid, there's a link you can click to go fight it. The boss fights are all separate puzzles (site's good about auto-saving so don't freak out if it takes over your tab and you have to hit back after). These are very themey, sometimes VERY evil (especially boss #1, feels a bit overtuned) self-contained 9x9 puzzles, probably using the same tools their area is themed around, and I don't think there's a single pre-placed number in any of them. Beat the boss puzzle, it gives you some flavor text and a number to place in its cell back in the main castle puzzle, plug that in and you're always going to unlock something cool. Usually a new item, sometimes other weird stuff, and it just goes on like that.

Don't expect to be able to fully solve a given grid in one go. It's a Metroidvania, backtracking is expected. Even if you've fully de-fogged a grid, later stuff might reward you by straight up adding new symbols you couldn't see before or doing weird stuff with fog. It IS all solvable with pure logic... but there ARE a few places that do that thing I hate in tougher sudokus where you just kinda have to pencil in in a different faction and explore 2 possible futures for a bit to see which eventually contradicts itself. And of course the last couple of grids do some really evil mind-bendy stuff.

But yeah aside from a couple gripes where the way a tool works could maybe be a lot more grammatically clear, that first boss being a lot to deal with as you're first getting your feet wet, and a particularly cruel twist later on, I don't really have any complaints. Well, it might need a cool soundtrack. Maybe play some Castlevania music. Maybe switch it up for some real proper boss music when you're nearing victory.

Again I am just completely blown away that someone made something so meaty in a standard sudoku site's normal UI, and really managed to make it feel so much like playing a DS Castlevania. Some real proof of game design being an art form here. And now you too can just completely lose a day or two to it!