Cracking the Cryptic Game Reviews

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Love this app. This has been a great sudoku app from the start just due to the quality of the puzzles. The new interface updates have solidified this as the perfect variant sudoku app. The GAS puzzle pack is very enjoyable so far!

Great for iPad, Improvement needed on Mac. This is an excellent companion app for YouTube channel Craking the Cryptic, with a great selection of variant sudoku puzzles. It works for Mac as well. However, it lacks support for keyboard, which is desperately needed to play on Mac. Considering the channel provides an excellent web app complete with keyboard support, adding that shouldn't be too hard. It would be a 5-star app if it had keyboard support.

Improved Interface and Puzzle Pack Support. Although built on the same framework as the other CtC apps, this one includes some very welcome interface updates, especially to how pencil mark and coloring tools work, and I’m excited to buy individual puzzle packs rather than new apps each time

Rules and hints impossible to parse. I can’t figure out why a given thing I do is against the special rules, and the hints aren’t all that clear

Always excellent. Excited to get this pack. Always excellent puzzles and hints when needed. Helps you improve skills with each attempt. Simon and Mark are great solvers. If you have not subscribed to the channel do so. Entertaining, social, close knit group without drama. One request, more frequent GAS.

I would rebuy all the older games as DLC just to use this app. I’ve played all the Sudoku apps by this developer. This is the best user interface so far. I would honestly pay for all the older games puzzles as DLC just so I can solve them in this UI. Also please add an advanced option to delete puzzle progress/history to make it easier to replay the game from scratch. 😉

The best sudoku out there. This is the latest app from Cracking the Cryptic, and I hope it’s the platform for all the future puzzles from them. The hand made and picked puzzles are the best and the toolset unmatched and the visuals are great too.

First puzzle doesn’t have a unique solution. On puzzle one got all the way until the end and came to where only square to fill were: r2c2, r2c3, r2c6, r3c3, r3c6, r4c2, r4c3. The only number to place were 3,5, and 9 to get a unique solution I could put a 5 in r2c2 which would give me in the same order as above: 5, 3, 9, 9, 5, 3, 5. that was wrong so I plugged in 3 and came to a situation where r2c3, r2c6, r3c3, r3c3 were 5 or 9 and were both completely interchangeable with nothing to give you a unique solution. If the very first puzzle isn’t solvable I think I’ll go play the other apps.

A wonderful app. I downloaded this app after getting back into sudoku for a variety of reasons. I have had such a blast solving the puzzles (which previously I would have put my head through the wall while attempting). The UI is gorgeous and very straightforward to a re-emerging sudoku enthusiast. The puzzles themselves are available in a variety of packs, some free and some paid. I have the utmost respect for the makers of this app and am so glad to be supporting them in their endeavors. Now, it’s time to get back to some solving!

I would give this app five stars if there was a way to clear progress or data. yep..: five stars once that feature is added

Best of the best. Love this app - especially two things: highlighting of the squares with notes and the large format.

Before you get mad like I did…. In the settings change the highlighting of errors to duplicates instead of the default setting. The second puzzle that I did I messed up, it highlighted an error, I couldn’t understand why then I just started putting numbers in until it didn’t say error and beat the whole thing in a better time than my first puzzle. Shouldn’t be default setting but it’s a setting you can change at least :p Sorry for run-on sentences english is my first and only language.

CtC - not what I was expecting. I’m a bit lazy to mess with the settings in the app. The interface is ok, but I prefer the CtC Sudoku Pad - it’s what I’m used to, and all the auto-shading, auto-removal is more than I’m willing to get used to. The free puzzles by Prasanna Seshadri are challenging. I did the first 5/7 before deciding, the app interface isn’t for me. I’d recommend looking into cracking the cryptic’s channel. They have completed hundreds of amazing puzzles that are crafted by even more amazing designers/setters.

Best. Absolutely best and most challenging sudoku I’ve ever found. Really fun!

Better color support. Great app! Please add better coloring support (more than 3 colors and multiple colors within a cell) like is shown in the videos.

Puzzles great, hints terrible. The harder puzzles are quite difficult. After an hour I tend to start looking at hints because I just want to get through it. So many times I read a hint that does not apply to the puzzle at all. Give a step by step solution or don’t bother. For example “colouring the 7s reveals that XYZ can’t go in rXcY.” And at the point I’m at it simply doesn’t reveal anything, but there’s no logic or explanation before that hint so there’s nothing you can do but plug the numbers in… and then you might as well be entering data into a grid. Frustrating enough for me to write a review which I almost never do.

Great puzzles and playability, with a couple caveats. I love Cracking the Cryptic, and the puzzles they have in the app are truly fantastic. The app has great marking features (two forms of pencil marking and colors) for solving these difficult puzzles as well. However, it eats battery like crazy and has (relatively) few puzzles for the price tag on each pack. Battery Life: 100% battery on my iPhone 14 Pro Max gets drained to ~50% after only a couple hours of play. Puzzle updates: I appreciate that they are hand crafted and manually hinted, but updates are frustratingly few and far between. I would love to play puzzles from videos here instead of Sudoku Pad (which doesn’t always import correctly), even without hints, for more content and variety.

Fun. These are a lot of fun and not incredibly difficult like they show on the channel.

Great app; GAS levels great for newer solver. The game works well and the multiple marking styles are great. The "Genuinely Approachable Sudoku" (GAS) levels are fun and not too challenging for someone new to these new styles of play. I'd love to see more of these. It would be nice to be able to import or set your own levels in the game. There's a display bug when changing between portrait and landscape, but nothing serious.

Not Approachable for Newcomers. I absolutely love the channel and solving puzzles. I don’t pretend to be the same level of genius as people who complete these puzzles within an hour but o knew I could try my hand at some puzzles and slowly build a skill set. Although the puzzles so far have been brutally challenging, I have found it to be an enjoyable experience for the most part. However. The one thing that is making some levels absolutely horrible experiences are the hints. The hints themselves often require leaps of logic that are in no way clear to the untrained eye. I will read some hints that claim something that I cannot for the life of mean prove to be true or understand and I don’t feel it’s right to make progress off of logic I don’t understand so I get stuck. The hints NEED to be readdressed and modified for anyone at any skill level. Although I already said I’m not a genius, I’m can say with a certain level of confidence that I am rather intelligent but it was still very very rough at times.

This is the BEST collection of variant sudoku you can find in an app!. The puzzles never feel same-y. Some are quite challenging, but if you hit a wall, the hint system gives you just the nudge you need—with an explanation of the logic, not just “3 in the corner.” The other CTC apps are also excellent, I highly recommend them all (Miracle Sudoku is my favorite). Looking forward to the next pack!

Great app from a great team. I’ve bought and played all of the ctc apps so far and haven’t been disappointed by any of them. The handpicked puzzles are always fun and difficulty with some tricky break ins but the hints are usually enough to aid in the start. Notes on the new update, it could use a keypad flip option. I’m used to a computer keyboard layout and it messes with me a little when using 123/789. Also the icon at the top left showing both the restraints and negative restraints was helpful in remembering when I should use certain logic but I don’t see it there anymore. Other than those few quality of life options, great new app and new update.

love it. hi can you please make a feature where we can erase our progress and start from scratch but w/ access to everything already unlocked? and can we have a favorites feature? btw i love this app and the yt channel :)

OBSESSED with this app - wish is was available on older macs. These puzzles are so addictive! Unfortunately my phone screen is a little small sometimes, and it would be nice to have the app on my computer. I have iOS 11 or later, but I don’t have an M1 chip. I would suggest making it available on more macs if possible, please.

Love This. I was already a big fan of the earlier apps (Killer, Arrow, etc) because of the phenomenal puzzle quality, but this app adds some features that I thought were lacking in the other ones (more colors, for example). I also like that new puzzle packs can be easily purchase and added to a single app.

Needs unique solutions. On multiple puzzles, I’ve encountered a point where there is no way to deduce the correct number positions because there are multiple solutions that could fit within the rules. The app is otherwise entertaining and not difficult to use, but having to plug in a 50/50 guess to see what errors out to solve a puzzle is frustrating.

Interface Issue. The Puzzles are great as always! But whenever I’m solving a kropki or xv puzzle with cages or sandwiches, all the dots stay on the screen while I’m looking at the options. It makes trying to work with the information a little more difficult, but I’m sure it’ll be fixed soon!

Good puzzles, drains battery. Interesting puzzles and twists on regular sudoku. The hints have some typos and the app drains battery worse than a video call, for no apparent reason, or I’d rate it higher.

Puzzles are good, hints are almost always wrong or vague. In so many puzzles, there will be a hint such a (r2c8 can only be 9), and when I go to input nine, it’s just wrong. Probably around 40% of the puzzles, I would say, contain uninterpretable typos

Poor attention to detail for hints in Domino Pack. The puzzles are great. I’m not a great solver (yet) and I need to resort to hints from time to time. It’s sad when it’s harder to understand the hints with wrong row/column references than it is to solve the puzzle! For the free puzzles it’s no big deal, but when I pay for an additional pack I expect a professional product. Is it too much to ask that a competent solver proofread the hints?

Great overall, some hard, I wish just one app. I love the variant sudoku is available through here and the intuitive app layout. Some of them are so hard that the hints don’t seem to make any sense because they just states are gonna be true without any explanation. Greater detail in the hints would be very helpful. Most importantly, I really wish that all the different packs were integrated into one app on my phone. I’m happy to keep paying the same amount per pack of puzzles, five dollars for Thermo, five dollars per knight pack, etc. But having a whole bunch of different apps to switch through is complicated to figure out which puzzle I want, where it is, and it and clutters up my phone. I really like that this version they released has multiple packs to buy within it, and I hope that they keep adding other options for in app purchases within this one app.

Another Great Sudoku App From Cracking The Cryptic!. I wrote a review a few days after this came out and it seems to have been lost, so I will try again. I have been excitedly awaiting this app for the last few months that Mark and Simon have been teasing it on their channel, and it has certainly lived up to the anticipation! These new variants are a fun challenge, expanding my skill set and teaching my brain new strategies and methods of logic to solve them. The Cracking The Cryptic collection are by far my favorite Sudoku apps, and I highly recommend this one and all their previous releases as well (Classic, Sandwich, Killer, Thermo, Arrow, Chess, Miracle). That’s enough reviewing from me - I have puzzles to solve. Say it with me now: let’s get cracking!

Great app, but the latest update was for the worst. The puzzles are great, but the update is making things hard to enjoy them. I love that the newest update included a new set of puzzles, but the quality of life changes certainly hurt my enjoyment of the app. I particularly miss the eraser (I realize the backspace key functions as an eraser, but it visually is less intuitive than an actual eraser icon) and the bulk erase trash bin, but the layout change is also distracting and unwieldy - in landscape mode, the puzzle is shoved as far to the left of the screen as possible with an awkward dead space on the right with the inputs below it. Why the forward/reverse, back, setting, and hint boxes aren’t in the dead space, I don’t know - instead they’re squashed between the puzzle and the number keys, making the bottom right of the screen very visually cluttered.

Transformative. It will make you question the existence of God and you will love every minute of it

My last review was 4 stars — now updated…. I have 3-4 ideas to improve the app. #1: Rather than allowing red numbers allow us a choice of coloring for the letters ( as well as tiles. #2: talk to Sven and enter a collaborative agreement to make your apps interchangeable #3 collect all cracking the cryptic apps as playable within this app without additional expenditures. #4 get Simon and Mark to prefer your software.

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Please allow iCloud between devices.. The app is great! The only down side is that the progression isn’t synchronized between devices. Please make it possible. Thanks

Cracking the cryptic app. Overall good puzzles but some puzzles have more than one solution

Puzzles are great but hints are not always helpful. Puzzles are fun until you run into a block, probably like 70% of the time the hints are well written but other times they say things like “all parity can now be determined” but they don’t explain what that means or how. Some issues with hints could help by some formatting, less so in this app but in other apps 2 hints for the same puzzle could say row then column in one hint then column then row in the next. Better spacing or maybe colours or bold might make them more readable. Some clues just tell you what to do and others give an actual hint, but the ones that tell you what to do don’t explain why, eg c1r134 are a 267 triple, but when I look at my pencil marks I cannot see why those digits cannot go in other cells. Basically a great game brought down by inconsistent hints. I already feel dumb when I go to the hints section, I don’t need the hints to prove me right

Excellent. The CTC apps are the best sudoku apps available, and I like the idea of a single app with the different types of Sudoku as in app purchases. Hopefully a future update would allow us to transfer the puzzles from the other apps onto this one, and keep all our CTC goodness in one place!

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Great app. Love the app and the new update!

Awesome. By far my favourite app love the domino variants

Brain-melting!. It's not the best Sudoku app I've used (That would be the excellent Good Sudoku by Zach Gage) but it's serviceable and the puzzles on offer here are wonderful.

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