Nerd Girl Thoughts

Over the years, I have amassed quite the collection of short, minimalist puzzle games which I load up once, play a handful of levels, and then proceed to forget about while I shop for more short, minimalist puzzle games. It’s a problem. However, I decided to see if I could actually finish one during #PuzzleGameMonth, and at only 50 levels, Hook seemed like it’d give me a pretty good chance at completion. In about 90 minutes, over a couple of evenings, I managed to finish all 50 levels, although more than once, I was sure the game had beaten me.

The concept is simple – click on the large black buttons to pull pins, until you have no pins left. The image above is one of the earlier puzzles, and it’s not too difficult to figure out the order of presses to make the pins come away smoothly. Press the button in the upper left, followed by the button on the right, and lastly, the one in the lower left.

But again, this is an early level.

As you progress, you’ll have more stuff to mess with in order to make things work. The image above is from a puzzle near the midgame. Still not terribly hard, but it’s starting to get complicated. Some levels have pieces that you need to rotate, some have pieces that send out a signal, and some have both. In the latter half of the game, you really have to think about every possible pathway. The game does eventually start giving you more than one mistake before it fully resets the level, but there were quite a few that took me several tries.

Hook has absolutely no story, no text, and you will need to learn from the game as you progress through it, but the puzzles are absolutely satisfying, and picking it up at full retail will likely give you at least an hour of puzzling for only a dollar. I’m glad I pulled this one out from the deeps of my library to play.