We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

A second webgame in a row, Urjo is a logic puzzle game about choosing which of each space in a grid should be red or blue, with the following conditions:

1. Every row and column must contain the same number of red and blue spaces.

2. Every numbered space must have the same number of spaces touching it (in the eight spaces around it) as its color.

3. No two adjacent rows or columns can have the same sequence of colors. In practice this is the most subtle rule. It doesn’t always come into play, but if it does it’ll probably be the breakthrough you’ll need to pull off a solve.

Every puzzle has a unique solution. It is similar in style to another web puzzle called 0h h1, but a major difference in presentation is that Urjo is watching as you try to solve it, and won’t let you make incorrect moves. Instead, it counts up all your mistakes and scores you on how well you did. You have an overall rating that goes up as you both complete puzzles with fewer errors and faster times than other solvers. This can be annoying (it’s easy to click the wrong size of a circle on accident), and it pushes you to try to solve them faster than you may feel comfortable, which may also cause inadvertent mistakes.

The software will try to give you puzzles just past your skill level, and I can verify that they get very difficult. If you make mistakes it’ll offer to give you some pointers. Myself I ignore those tips; but I can see how some people might find them useful.

Urjo (web, free)

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