Nurikabe World

Nurikabe World is a relaxing logic puzzle game based on the japanese pen and paper Nurikabe. I didn’t know what Nurikabe was before playing this game, and there’s a chance you don’t know either. You can see it as a more complex minesweeper variant, you have a grid with numbers on it that you need to use to deduce the correct cells and form islands.

The rules are as follows:
-Each island must be the size of the number it contains
-You can only have one number in an island
-The islands must be isolated, the sides of an island must be surrounded by water
-You’re not allowed to make 2×2 water areas
-The water must form one continuous and connected river

Instead of a plain black and white grid, Nurikabe World visually depicts the water and the islands. Completing an island also make it grow trees and buildings; combined with the incredibly soothing music, this game probably has the most relaxing atmosphere I’ve ever seen in a puzzle game.

The puzzles range from trivial to hard, but more than half of the game is easy. There’s a gigantic intro chapter followed by another big easy chapter, and that’s clearly far too much as there are only 4 chapters in total. The hard levels are only found in the last one, the game would’ve deserved to have at least another hard chapter. I wouldn’t be surprised if people dropped the game because of how much time you need to spend on those really easy puzzles.

Like any logic game, Nurikabe World also has randomly generated puzzles of various difficulty, but they are obviously far inferior to the handcrafted ones. That’s why I still completed everything, a lot of efforts went into the puzzle design with a lot of variety and themes that still make easy puzzles enjoyable.

This is not a game in which the more cells you deduce, the easier it gets. It’s quite the opposite, the end of a puzzle is usually the hardest part as you often need to follow your instinct a bit… and you want to avoid that at all cost.
The more advanced the puzzles get, the more rules need to be used. You probably won’t really care about the rule “The water must form one continuous and connected river” for the vast majority of the puzzles, yet it actually needs to be used to deduce cells in the later levels. I like it when logic games have a lot of different ways to deduce things, this allows the more difficult levels to be harder because they are smarter, not because they are bigger.

Nurikabe World is a very good game that offers plenty of inspired levels with an incredible atmosphere, including some really, really good challenges.
Recommended.

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Developer: Hemisquare
Publisher: Hemisquare
Platform: Steam – Windows/Linux/macOS
Release Date: January 13, 2025