Digital adaptations of pen and paper or board games are a great gateway into going back to basics with some great game or puzzle ideas. This happened to me over the last week with Nurikabe World, a digital glow-up of the pen and paper logic game Nurikabe. I had no prior knowledge of this Japanese game but became immediately hooked on the excellent puzzle design and aesthetic Nurikabe World has to offer. This is a pitch-perfect casual puzzle game with just enough bite to keep you coming back day after day.
Nurikabe World is set in a Japanese or Finnish setting with all four seasons adding various weather or graphical effects to your board of play. On the board will be a grid of squares, which will be at least 5×5 big. Placed onto the board will be several squares with numbers on and these are islands you’ll need to create by clicking squares around them to create a river. If the number is 3, the island must be three squares connected horizontally or vertically (diagonal doesn’t count) in any shape. If match your island numbers to their squares, you’ve done well but you haven’t won the level. To win a level of Nurikabe, you must satisfy all three winning states:
- Your islands must be separated by water.
- Your river must flow in one continuous stream.
- You cannot have a 2×2 water area as this will create a whirlpool.
If you manage to do all these things, you win!
What Nurikabe World does so well is to explain these rules in a practical way, with hints and tips to help you unpick even the biggest levels using logic and deduction. A one square island must always have all its horizontal and vertical tiles as water for example, as islands must be separated by water. A diagonal tile between a 2 island square where both ground exists will always be a water tile too. These hints and tips are dropped in across a 300 level campaign that increases the scale of the board and then plays with its shape too. The more artistic – almost picross-like the board, the more you have to think about making sure your river is one continuous stream. Everything flows beautifully in this game and the difficulty curve is expertly judged.
To help you along, you can add dots to land tiles to sketch out islands you think might exist before committing to them. Another click undoes a river tile, returning it to land again. Things are just so fast and clean, it lets you focus on the puzzle at hand. Whilst thinking you’ll have a luscious traditional Japanese spa soundtrack to relax to and there are lots of optional graphical effects like autumn leaves blowing across the screen that you can turn on or off too. Alongside this, the campaign mode adds some rule variations too. Pairs mode asks you to pair islands together so that their total landmass equals their combined number, for example. It expands a great idea further and stops it from becoming stale.
Beyond the campaign mode, there are daily puzzles and an infinite mode that procedurally generates levels for you depending on the difficulty you select. There is also an intuitive level editor, which allows you to create your own levels from scratch or import the campaign levels to see how they were built. The level editor lets you create levels in a minute or two and it self-validates your creation in real time so it is obvious if you’ve built an unworkable level. Instead of going down Steam Workshop integration, the level editor generates a code which you can share with your friends. This then allows you to enter the code in the User Levels menu and play what your friend has created. This works nicely in practice but isn’t quite as seamless as an in-game download browser for example.
[EDIT: Steam Workshop was added in February 2025]
Put simply, Nurikabe World is a pitch-perfect casual logic puzzle game. It tells you the rules and so long as you consider them all, you’ll eventually win the level. The aesthetic and style of the game are sublime, the level designs varied and creative, and the level editor and infinity modes bring endless replayability. I feel like I may have already peaked with my favourite pick-up-and-play puzzle game for 2025 already! Don’t sleep on this because some might think it is too casual – it will scratch a logic itch you didn’t know you had.
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