Tents and Trees Review

Tents and Trees is a puzzle game developed by Frozax Games, all centred around a logic puzzle created by Léon Balmaekers. If you’ve never heard of this type of brainteaser, the rules are pretty simple. You’ll be setting up tents within a grid, where there must be a tent next to every tree but not adjacent to other tents horizontally, vertically or diagonally. Match the number tents to the numbers in the columns and rows like in Picross, and you solve it. That’s the entire game.

Now, I’ve never really played any Picross-like game, and most of my logic is taken straight from videogames, so this will be fun.

I wasn’t aware that this was a thing at first, but the game does ease you into the flow of things, giving you a quick tutorial and some easy puzzles to solve to get used to the mechanics. The controls feel smooth, both on keyboard and controller. With a mouse, you can solve a level in seconds if you know what you’re doing, but using a controller feels more deliberate when solving. However, that’s not to say that you’ll be solving everything like it’s nothing.

The difficulty and order of the levels are just right, slowly ramping up the brain power needed to figure out the solution. These puzzles do really make you think and get way more complicated as the grid grows in size: I’ve definitely had to sit back and stare at the screen several times, even restart the level just so I could tackle it with a new approach. If you’re stuck, there is a hint system, but sometimes it just reiterates the rules or flashes what’s wrong. It’s not the most helpful, I found, and it does prevent you from getting a perfect clear, so I didn’t find myself using it even if I was. Although, there’s nothing much stopping you from taking a screenshot and resolving it.

While solving puzzles in itself is satisfying, you do get a few rewards as you finish levels. Solve enough puzzles, and you get to unlock new themes that change the looks of the game, from a nighttime campout to being on the moon. They’re really nice and it’s a sweet reward for getting to that point. And like any good puzzle game, there are daily puzzles to solve when you’ve run out of the classic levels, so you’ve got something to tease your brain every day. You will have to earn the right for daily challenges as it requires 50 completed levels.

You do realise that none of these images are even close to the answer, right?

And that’s pretty much Tents and Trees. It is a great example of a coffee or morning game to play and something to do after a long day of work. You will lose yourself to this game, even if you don’t spend a long play session with it. There’s nothing wrong here, so why not give it a go?