OddThinking

Introducing Laserbox

Laserbox, from Dust United, is another casual logic game that I have been playing.

The field consists of a grid of cardboard boxes. Each box may (randomly) be empty or contain a two-sided mirror mounted diagonally in either of two orientations. There are a fixed and known number of mirrors within the entire grid. The goal of the game is to correctly label each of the boxes with the mirror inside.

To determine the contents of the boxes, you have a laser gun with two settings. In its normal setting, it fires a constant beam, which starts at any point along any of the four edges and travels straight through the boxes, unless it is deflected 90 degrees by the mirrors in the boxes. The final destination after all the deflections is highlighted.

In its pulse setting, the gun sends a pulse that you can watch to determine how long it takes to travel along the same path. The path length can give you clues as to the path the pulse has taken. There is a restriction that the pulse will stop travelling and die out at a fixed maximum length (proportional to the grid size).

Finally, when you correctly identify a box as empty, the box is removed, which allows you visibility to the laser as it travels through that cell. As you identify more empty boxes, you get more clues to help solve the rest of the puzzle.

What do I think of Laserbox?

It looks like a lot of casual gameplay logic games I enjoy. You’ll see a familiar grid of cells that needs to be filled with one of three values in order to solve constraints imposed locally and globally.

However, I hate Laserbox.

Wait, I don’t simply hate it. I simply wouldn’t play it in that case. No, it is a game I love to hate.

Implementation

It isn’t the implementation that I love to hate. I simply dislike the implementation.

• It is slow to load and play.
• It is buggy.
• It uses isometric graphics which wastes video real-estate without adding to the game.
• It has a nasty and slow menu system.
• A short period into the game, it changes the background randomly, and starts playing horrible background music, which leaves you jumping for the mute button.
• Cardboard boxes? Lasers that can travel through cardboard? Wait, why can we see the lasers anyway? I see no smoke. Slow moving laser pulses? Hmmm… perhaps I am taking this too literally.
• The pulses provide key information about the path length, but require you to be observant and be able to count in time to extract the most out of it. The rest of the game is not a real-time game (apart from racing the clock for a higher score), so this doesn’t fit into the logic format. Just display the number of units of time taken in each cell, and save me the effort.
• Similarly, why have two types of laser fire when one could serve both roles?
• The whole interface is fiddly, and I have lost several games through inaccurate clicking instead of faulty logic.

The Rules

However, it is the rules of the game themselves that really cause me concern.

Path Length

I guess the limit on the path length of the laser pulse is intended to increase the difficulty, and indeed it does. However, sometimes the paths bounce off many mirrors and end up so long that there are points that cannot be measured.

Some ambiguities can only be resolved by measuring the length. Occasionally, this pulse length limitation leads to ambiguous situations where the player can only guess and hope.

Examples of two mirror patterns that are indistinguishable, without path lengths.

Indistinguishable Patterns

Some arrangements of tiles are completely indistinguishable from laser reflections, even if they are within the range of the laser pulse.

Examples of two mirror patterns that are indistinguishable, even with path lengths.

Again, when one of these patterns occurs, it is necessary for the player to guess which one it may be, and to hope.

These patterns are not particularly rare. In a large playing field (e.g. 16×16) they can be expected.

Note: Even knowing the number of remaining mirrors doesn’t help because both patterns contain the same number of mirrors.

Work-around

There is a work-around to these issues of ambiguity. The game will immediately end in loss if you incorrectly mark a cell as being empty (or “break the mirror”). It will immediately end in success if you mark all the mirrors correctly, even if there are some unmarked boxes left. However, if you incorrectly mark an empty box as
having a mirror, the game will continue.

It is therefore possible to solve the entire puzzle apart from the ambiguous pieces, and then try out every combination by marking the possible mirrors (but not breaking any boxes).

I don’t consider such trial and error to be a legitimate tactic.

Conclusion

Laserbox has given me a lot of thought – I have considered how I would implement path lengths and visible cells as constraints in a Laserbox-solver implementation.

It has also given me a lot of frustration – I have solved the 16×16 grid, but only after dozens of failed games.

In the end, I decided that the ambiguities make the game-play too flawed to both implementing a solver, even if I was to remove the maximum pulse path length constraint.