RYO Review

Red and yellow make orange, red and blue make purple, and yellow and blue make green. Those elementary school art class maxims form the heart of RYO’s colorful puzzles. From there, they develop rich and full shades, tints, and tones, but never become much more complex than finger paintings.

RYO (Red Yellow Orange) is a game decidedly not for the color blind. To solve its puzzles, players must draw lines connecting two dots of the same color. Early levels are just a matter of joining red with red, blue with blue, and so on. However, the vast majority of the 80 stages take advantage of the game’s unique mixing mechanic. Say there’s a red dot on one end of the grid and an orange one across from it. Linking those two as is obviously won’t work. However, now say there are two yellow dots and the line connecting them runs perpendicular to the hypothetical line joining red and orange. Once the red line crosses the yellow line it now becomes orange and successfully joins the two different colors.

Everything clever about the game basically stems from this blending ability. It forces players to be mindful of what order and direction they connect the dots to create the right paths for more intersections. The game uses pigment-based color mixing, as opposed to light-based. Recognizing what colors make up the endless gradient permutations becomes increasingly challenging as the colors get stranger and more interchangeably beige. But RYO never becomes a particularly challenging game. In fact, it might have benefitted from a “hardcore” mode that perhaps tasked players with completing puzzles flawlessly instead of scraping by on trial-and-error.

For a game about color though, RYO could stand to be a bit prettier. It’s essentially just colored lines on a black background. The shifting colors themselves are pleasant to look at, as are the abstract shapes and overlapping elements of the finished puzzles, but overall it is a little plain.

However, anyone looking to stretch those old color wheel muscles should still give RYO a look.

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