Marple Review

Marple is a logic and deduction style puzzle game developed by Mikko Kankainen for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Marple is the iPhone version of an older PlamOS game, called Hercule, with slightly better graphics. Currently, Marple is retailing for $1.99 in the Apple iTunes App Store and features 100,000 puzzles, high score entry and several game settings.

Marple Gameplay

By all accounts, the Marple game board is a mess. The upper section of the game is filled with rows, columns, colored tiles, symbols, dice, numbers and letters. If that doesn’t cause you a little anxiety, wait, there’s more. The lower section of the game contains more of the symbols, dice, numbers and letters only this time they are arranged in a special “clue” language. It’s really very confusing to anyone who isn’t familiar with the how the game works.

Marple is not a game that anyone can just pick up and play. No. First you have to learn the game objective, then figure out how the game board works, then tackle the “clue” system before finally trying to figure out where and how to start. Marple does include in-game help, but it’s not entirely helpful. In order to understand Marple you really need to see pictures. Luckily, the game developer has them on his website.

Here’s my basic understanding of how the game works:

The game is divided into two sections. The top area contains four rows. Each row has five spots. In each of the five spots are a group of five tiles. The type of tiles found in each spot depend on which row you are looking at. The first row contains letters, the next row contains numbers, then comes the dice row finished up by the sybmols rows. Your job is to remove four tiles from each of the five spots so that each row has just one unique tile in each spot. Figuring out the order of the tiles (ie: which spot they go in) is where the challenge of Marple lies. This is where the lower part of the game board comes into play.

The lower part of the game board contains a set of clues. The clues tell you things about where the tiles go and come in four flavors. A clue with three different tiles tells you the middle tile in the clue is between the other two. Any tile followed by “…” followed by another tile tells you the tile on the left is somewhere to the left of the other tile in the clue. Clues where two tiles are separated by an up and down arrow tell you the tiles belong in the same column. Lastly, there is the “next to” clue which is shown in the form TileA-TileB-TileA. This clue says that TileA and TileB are next to each other but does not tell you wich tile comes first in the relationship. Marple players use these clues to begin deducing which tiles cannot exist in certain spots.

The first step in Marple is to begin removing tiles from spot you know they cannot be. To do this players simply tap on the tile group and then tap tiles they wish to remove from the group. For example, if you have a clue that says 5 is between Star and B, then you know 5 cannot be located in the far left or right columns. So, tap the left column and remove 5 and then tap the right column and remove 5. Repeat this process over and over, using varying amounts of logic until you have set the correct spot for each of the twenty tiles.

I liked the Marple game idea and enjoyed the logic side of things quite a bit but didn’t care for the way Marple was implemented on the iPhone.

Marple’s learning curve is moderately steep and doesn’t have enough in game support to be an enjoyable process. The screen is unnecessarily cramped. So much more could have been done with the clue area to make the clues bigger but take up less space. There isn’t a reliable undo option in Marple. Unfortunately, if you make a mistake you have to sort of manually retrace your steps (this is further complicated if you have “auto-deduce” turned on). The “Whoops” warning while helpful, is overwhelmingly annoying. Similarly, the “auto-deduce” option can be both helpful or harmful to your game. Luckily, you can turn these options off in the settings menu, but should you really have to? Both these options are really helpful, they’re just implemented in a way that can seriously bonk your game experience. My last little criticism of Marple is the vague icon only navigation menu.

Marple Graphics

There’s really not a lot to Marple’s graphics. The game alerts are all iPhone stock SDK stuff, the High Score screen is very plain and lists too many high scores. The menu icons are pretty average, if not vague.

Marple Sound

Marple does not include sounds.

Marple Price

Currently, Marple is retailing for $1.99. With some work on the game features, and help file two bucks would be a good price, considering the 100,000 included puzzles.

Marple Summary

Marple is an interesting logic and deduction game with a steep learning curve, frustrating features and a lack of polish and style. If you like puzzles and don’t mind reading through directions over and over, Marple may be worth a look. If you are easily frustrated or don’t have a lot of time to figure things out, steer clear of this game.

By: Aaron Robbins