Week of Love: Ah, Love! (PC)

Tile sliding puzzles and mazes are some of the laziest and most dull ways video game developers inject puzzle elements into their video games, but if there wasn’t some appeal to them, then they’d probably stop doing it. The key to making either form of play more interesting than something that just takes a long time to finish is to make the player think about how they’re either moving the tiles or moving about the maze. Ah, Love! chooses the dangerous route of having all its play centered around these two puzzle types, but combines them into an experience that does actively engage your mind so that it almost doesn’t deserve to be compared to those two puzzle types, it instead finding an effective middle ground between them.

Ah, Love! is a collection of 120 puzzles, where each stage is divided into squares that can have their positions swapped with any other tiles that are adjacent either horizontally or vertically. The goal of the tile sliding is to help two hearts reach each other, a pink one representing the heart of a woman and a blue one representing a man’s. The game’s menus, results screens, and the hearts themselves all go towards establishing this theme of love, with the goal of bringing the hearts together serving as a decent fit for the romantic style. There’s no real story to it, but a bit more identity to focused puzzle-solving doesn’t hurt the game at all, save for the somewhat crowded heart-shape level select screens that don’t list the levels in order. On the other hand, rather than the squares all being practical designs meant to challenge you, sometimes you get a nice level that has a giant heart or the word LOVE spelled out with the boxes, making it feel less sterile.

Bringing the hearts together isn’t as simple as jut putting their boxes next to each other though. The hearts have a magnetic draw to each other, the hearts sliding around in their current square as best they can to be as close to the other heart as possible. Even when on the opposite sides of the larger puzzle arrangements, they’ll drift as close as they can until they hit a wall or corner. With each little square containing some form of barrier to block the hearts from reuniting, you need to slide the boxes around so their magnetic nature will draw them around the obstructions and guide them towards uniting. You have to make sure both hearts are moving around as you like when you’re swapping the tiles around since both hearts will adjust based on the new positions, but you can overcome some of the difficulty be deliberately trapping a heart until you’re ready for it to move or even just moving the boxes quickly enough that they don’t have time to orient themselves in a less than optimal way. This is how Ah, Love! overcomes the usually dull design of mazes and tile sliders. Here, the tile sliding is the way you navigate your pieces through the mazes, the player needing to move them wisely to best guide the hearts around. It’s easy to see your progress and it requires careful thought to get things moving in the right direction rather than something like trial and error or a long tedious process. The puzzle design is easy to understand and there’s very little pressure, and while you can end up unable to complete a puzzle if you put the two hearts in the same tile and they can’t reach other, restarting is easy and no puzzle is so long or complicated that you are kept from trying again and correcting whatever error got you there.

While the low pressure affair may make Ah, Love! a pretty decent time waster to pull up from time to time, the 120 levels probably could have done with something more to them than the basic tile dragging formula to make it stand out. Ah, Love! seems to understand this on some level, as there are four unique obstructions in the mazes that can mess a player up. The first obstruction is perhaps more a puzzle element than a danger, that being special blocks that can you press to toggle them from being up or being down, the hearts only able to pass through when the blocks are down. Besides potentially throwing off the hearts’ movements if you aren’t paying attention, these are mostly beneficial. You can trap a heart to keep it still while working on the other, and they can even be raised to prevent you from slipping into the actually dangerous areas such as tiles you are unable to move. Red squares can’t be swapped no matter what, and sometimes it can be necessary to have your hearts pass through them despite this, so the player must carefully use the other heart to magnetically draw it out of the danger zone.

There are two hazards that can completely end your work on solving a puzzle though. The more common one would have to be spikes, little patches of them found in levels that will instantly break any heart that happens to pass over them. While you can usually just correct errors when moving through regular maze tiles, a spike will force a restart if touched, and sometimes you might have to move things quickly or block spikes off intelligently to complete a puzzle. The spikes do have an interesting extra use though, and that’s to deal with the final problem: black hearts. Some stages will have a third heart appear, the black heart drawn to the nearest heart in the same magnetic manner and hoping to get between the two. If either of your hearts unites with the black heart, you lose that puzzle, but if you can cordon it off with the toggle blocks or get it to run over spikes, it can be dealt with. Some stages that isn’t an option though, so outmaneuvering it becomes another little factor to consider.

The extra obstacles do mean Ah, Love! doesn’t feel too plain, but these new mechanics are introduced early on and there isn’t too much evolution of them in the later stages. Later puzzles may mix them together or make the general movement require planning your moves before the swapping starts, but for the most part Ah, Love! consistently mixes its same few ideas together. This makes the puzzle solving a decent pastime, but Ah, Love! does have two extra goals you can shoot for. Every level has a move counter that keeps track of how many swaps you’ve made in a level, each stage having a recommended amount of moves it takes to complete. Stages can be completed in less moves than the recommended amount at times, but if you do complete the stage with more moves, you’re only missing out on an achievement, so it just serves as a way to push yourself to do better. The game also contains pink regions in some squares called romance zones that it encourages you to do the heart matching inside of, but this is also optional and rewarded only with an achievement if you can do it in every stage. These small optional objectives can give Ah, Love! a bit more longevity without sacrificing the low-pressure atmosphere since the game remains only truly focused on completion. Some stages do seem to be designed more as challenges if you’re going for these extra objectives though, making them a little plain for players only looking to complete the puzzles and move on.

THE VERDICT: Ah, Love! takes the often tired and tedious formats of mazes and tile sliding puzzles and introduces a puzzle element that makes them actually work quite well together. Moving the tiles around to guide the two hearts to become one requires some thought and their magnetic attraction to each other makes play about deliberate, planned movements. A romantic theme and a dash of small hazards you must avoid prevents Ah, Love! from feeling lifeless despite its level design sometimes requiring practical yet plain wall arrangements to put up a fight, and while it is certainly simple overall, the simplicity seems to be part of its appeal. Like a book full of word searches or Sudoku, it’s a good fit for a pastime that will mentally stimulate you a bit, and considering its tile slider and maze roots, it certainly could have been much worse.

And so, I give Ah, Love! for PC…

An OKAY rating. Much like an activity book, Ah, Love! serves its purpose well, but its digital nature allows for a unique angle of interactivity that pen and paper would struggle with. It’s not hard to pick up how to play Ah, Love! but it does require some thought to complete, which is a smart way of designing puzzles that are a nice fit for idly completing. Perhaps it would have been more accessible on mobile, but that would likely mean sacrificing some of the more intricate or larger designs to try and fit smaller phone screens, meaning that the PC platform did allow it to better explore its small set of ideas. Much like a book of word searches though, sometimes introducing too many new elements could taint the approachability of the puzzle set, so while there may be new and interesting ways to twist the design of this love-based puzzler, it settles into a little niche that it probably doesn’t need to be pulled out of.

Besides a few almost negligible quirks like the cluttered level select, Ah, Love! is just a game that is what it needs to be. It’s a collection of little puzzles that take a few minutes to complete at most but can still tickle your brain a bit while you figure their simple design out. For something to do during your down time, Ah, Love! provides a fine batch of puzzles to play with, but it’s not likely to truly capture your heart due to that simplicity.