PaAni Review

PaAni is a changeling puzzle game where players choose the correct tablets in a larger set of tablets. The game is tough! But, given a few more hours with the game, I probably could have mastered it. I don’t believe many people will want to play the game long enough to master it.

Gameplay is simple, but fairly challenging. The goal is to pick three stone tablets. But there are rules to how they can be chosen. There are four elements to the tablets: the color, the shape, the rune, and the number of runes. Given a set of tablets, the player must choose three tablets that adhere to the following rules:

• The three tablets are either all the same color or all different colors.
• The three tablets are either all the same shape or all different shapes.
• The three tablets either contain the same rune design or have three different rune designs.
• The three tablets either have the same number of runes or all have different numbers of runes (one, two, and three).

It’s tough to check against all of these rules every time the player decides on three potential tablets. It feels more like a hidden object game than a puzzle sometimes. There are three “objects” on the board that the user has to find. They just have to complete some puzzle elements before choosing them.

It’s definitely a complicated and tough game. And there are even other elements like filling the magic bar to reveal the next three tablets. But the game is simply too repetitive and a bit boring. It feels a bit like Sudoku puzzles (the way players constantly check against the other tablets like they would other tiles in a Sudoku) but without as much entertainment as a Sudoku.

This is definitely a game that a diehard puzzle fan would get some enjoyment out of. I enjoyed the game for a while but, once I realized that there wasn’t anything else to the game, I started to get bored. For $1.99, it’s worth a try for someone looking for a real challenge in a puzzle game.

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