I get the layouts, its not a good minesweeper layout. I understand if i see a row of 8s theres a quick 1 hit enemy in the back. I get the ?s and the pattern of the map. This is closer to a puzzle game with one critical path than a minesweeper game where youre exploring a map and given information to clear the map. In the game of minesweeper, you don't need meta knowledge to beat the map youre playing. In minesweeper, theres very few instances where you have to make a blind guess into territory to find and 8 spot surrounded by mines.
This game isn't very fun, in my honest opinion and im glad you find this enjoyable yourself but don't tell me im missing information. The game isn't designed in a way that i find enjoyable and ive decided its not a game for me. I dont hate it, but as a game designer myself i feel that the direction this game decided to go in is fundamentally against the design of minesweeper itself.
If theres only one critical path to winning the game, then its not a very good minesweeper game in its design in my opinion. And im allowed to feel this way, the same way you feel like its a simple game.
I concur with what others have told you. I think you might be missing something. I just started playing this yesterday, and after failing the first few tries, it's pretty easy to beat the game consistently. The hard part is getting the perfect score, that I have not yet achieved. And sure, if you know the "1" surrounded by "8" pattern, you can go faster, etc. but those are not needed for beating the game (I just learned about them a few mins ago reading comments here actually, but it was never a blocker for finishing the game).
I must be, clearly, Cause the winning strategy that worked for me is very much opposed to how i feel minesweeper should be played and thats okay this game is different but I am an avid fan of minesweeper as a game and this takes away from the design of minesweeper i've come to enjoy. I've watched some videos of other people playing, and the strategy seems more luck based than logic based which is not what minesweeper should be.
But the design is minesweeper with hidden information. Every enemy except for the bats, skeletons and green slimes has a feature that you can use to make deductions:
- Why are there different sprites for the mice?
- Why are the shields of the guardians different?
- Why does the minotaur turn around when you open a chest?
- Is there a pattern in how gargoyles appear?
- Where does the mine-exploding scroll skeleton usually appear?
etc etc
Thats meta knowledge, and I think having to lose enough games to understand each of those aspects makes for an interesting dungeon crawler game, but not a very fun Minesweeper game. Forgive me for feeling this way, but this feels like a puzzle game like memory cards and not a puzzle game like minesweeper.