The Knight’s tour is a sequence of moves on a chessboard in which the knight piece, moving in its ‘L’ shape formation, will visit every square on the chessboard (traditionally 8×8) only once. This fun head scratcher has roots dating back as far as the 9th century AD and is commonly given to computer science students as a little test of their programming skills. Fast forward to 2012 and you’ll see that Philippe FUNK has been working on Sukeima which is a numerical digit variation on the knight’s tour game that turns this ancient puzzle into an addictive little game incorporating the format and style of the ever popular games Go, Chess and Sudoku. By the time that 2014 has rolled around Mr FUNK released his first ISO application and today we have Sukeima – The Quest.
The premise of the game is very simple; help a very cute owl solve a whole world full of puzzles, collecting precious gems along the way to become a Sukeima master. The graphics are bright, fun, colourful and reminiscent of a lot of Japanese anime with soft water colour pictures of mist covered mountains and temples in the background.
Your main compadre will be the aforementioned owl who’ll be with you the whole way laughing and cheering in true high pitched and child-like manga fashion. The background music is quite pleasant and offers a tranquil aural back-drop to your puzzle solving and an exciting adventurous feel when you complete a puzzle and get to move onto the next round. However, I found the laughing owl to be slightly cloying and after a little while opted for either silence or a carefully curated spotify playlist instead.
The app itself is free initially, but once you’ve run out of your 3 lives then you’ll have to pay to continue: £0.79 for 5 lives or a confusing £2.29 for 10 (I’m no mathematician but I think I know which one I’d opt for). You can also purchase additional ‘magic minutes’ if you’re having trouble completing the puzzles in the allocated time.
The app has been nominated in the Best Mobile App Awards the the SB App Awards as well, whether this means anything is still up in the air, but if you’ve played Sukeima and enjoyed it then you can throw them a friendly vote – why not?
To start puzzling you can download Sukeima from the App Store or Google Play today!
