It took me a very long time to really get into PC gaming. A lot of this is because I grew up with consoles primarily, but I do remember the day that the family got our first PC. This creaky plastic monster was I assume purchased to write up important documents and other boring adult things, but all I cared about were the games. I couldn’t believe my luck when I discovered the pre-installed folder full of wonder, and spent hours of my life with 3D Space Cadet Pinball. I dabbled in the other games too though, like for example Minesweeper. Little did I know that in the future Minesweeper would enter my life again thanks to Infinity Sweeper, a Roguelike take on that bomb disposal puzzler.
If you haven’t played Minesweeper before, it’s a fairly simple puzzle game that will test your brain pretty intensely. You have a grid of squares full of mines, and you need to locate them all without accidentally clicking on one. Safe squares all have a number on them, which corresponds to how many mines surround that tile. If you find an eight then you know every square surrounding it is a mine, if you find a one then you know there can only be a single dangerous spiky foe lurking nearby. Logical thinking is the key to success in Minesweeper, and that carries across nicely to Infinity Sweeper.
Infinity Sweeper starts out very much the same as that PC classic puzzler, with standard Minesweeper stages leading up to a boss stage. You have three lives on any given run, and uncovering a mine will take one of these away. If you’ve been living on a Windows 95 PC all these years you’ll feel right at home, but otherwise it’s time to brush up on your skills.
As someone who was a little rusty at clicking boxes, the bosses absolutely ruined me for my first couple of hours with the game. Although essentially the same as the regular stages (albeit a bit bigger) they feature a nasty time limit that can catch you out very easily. The switch from a thoughtful pace to lightning fact decision making is jarring, so don’t lose hope if you take a bit of a battering.
Infinity Sweeper is a Minesweeper Roguelike, so obviously there are some random elements and power ups that set it apart from the game we played on the PCs at school. Between each round you’ll be taken to a shop, where you can spend the gold you earn for completing a stage (with more granted if you’re quicker). There are three types of power ups you can grab at the store – single use cards, permanent effects and new tiles. All of these do something different, and if you’re lucky you’ll find some that synergise with helpful results.
The range of effects all these items have is pretty varied, although I must admit that I ended up ignoring a lot of them. I got the most use out of effects that exploded the board and let me ignore some areas, or automatically flipped specific safe tiles without worrying. My best run involved an effect that granted me free random cards, so I had lots of opportunities to flip over tiles without risk or gain extra lives just because of the sheer amount of single use effects at my disposal.
As you progress past boss fights you’ll also have to choose your path through a run, with different buffs and traps that’ll change the way you play. You’ll discover pretty quickly which of these to avoid like the plague, unless you have very specific builds to counter certain routes anyway.
There are some build options though that I just couldn’t gel with, like ones that focused on bonus gold when I always had plenty or granting points (which I still don’t actually know the importance of at all). There are also trap disarming effects that allow you to get rid of negative tiles, but I never found these debuffs that hard to deal with. Maybe with better onboarding I’d have understood more systems and the value of more upgrades, but for the most part I just focused on mine sweeping.
I do think the main issue with Infinity Sweeper is just how little it explains itself. Outside of a tiny tutorial you have no real way of learning how different effects work, and the complexity of so many cards make them seem useless at first or even tenth glance. This generally just led to a lot of failure on my part as I bashed my head against the wall and uncovered more mines. There’s no progression either so losing doesn’t exactly feel amazing when you’re not learning from mistakes.
I did enjoy my time with Infinity Sweeper, but I think a lot of that is just because Minesweeper is a fun puzzling time with or without Roguelike trappings. With a lack of onboarding and upgrades that seem underwhelming, the unique hook of Infinity Sweeper ends up being its downfall. The experience does get better as you play more and experiment with different tiles and effects, but you have to do some work to mine your way to the gold core of this Roguelike.
