Adore Puzzle

Adore Puzzle is a level-based tile swapping and sliding puzzle game. Each level provides an image of a landmark from a European country, then cuts it into rectangular pieces and scrambles them.

The player has the choice of putting them back together by solving a sliding puzzle or by swapping the tiles around directly.

Tile sliding was one of the earliest games to come to personal computers, but Adore does a fair job of nicely dressing it up in modernity with a stylish graphical interface and a level-based, if not clearly story-driven, progression. The audio is nice and there is a fullscreen option - a must if the standard view extends beyond your screen resolution. Still, I find it hard to become engaged by this simple of a puzzle. The game permits multiple accounts and keeps high scores for the fastest completion of each puzzle type, which could make this a nice game for a family with multiple kids.

Sam's Protip: Solving a solitaire sliding-tile game is like solving a Rubik's cube; once you understand the problem-solving method, variations become trivial to solve if you know where the pieces need to go. Save yourself some frustration and look up the strategy!