There is now a Sudokuvania 2, and it is also great.
Some time ago, a really brilliant designer had the completely bonkers idea of really pushing the limits of an online Sudoku playing site called Sudokupad to create something that is simultaneously a very very large and complicated variant Sudoku puzzle, and also, somehow, a Metroidvania game, with a plot, powerups to collect unlocking new areas for exploration, and boss battles. If you've ever heard of it before, it is almost certainly because I wrote this blog post about it at the time, and that sucker really got spread around.
Since then, there's been a few developments. The creator, Skeptical Mario, registered the appropriate .com domain which HOPEFULLY now has better SEO to it now than the one blog post of mine, and which should always link to the newest revision of the game. It ALSO links to several other metapuzzles from other creators that were heavily inspired by the original Sudokuvania. As of this writing, someone called The M knocked out two of these that took the obvious next step, lifting inspiration from Super Metroid. They're pretty similar experiences, with their own flavor. Part of that flavor is asking you do do a whole lot of doodling and coloring all over the map, which is cute, but not great with this UI. The second game of the duo though has a real clever trick to it where a couple power-ups get upgrades later on, where suddenly what seemed like a pretty straightforward symbol secretly provides a second flavor of hint.
Also on the site, a pretty wide assortment of "Instructionless Nested Sudoku" puzzles from Michael Lefkowitz. These are "like Sudokuvania" in that they're super weird and nerdy metapuzzles, but the premise is different.
As you can maybe make out in these preview images, there are no given numbers, also no given rules, but several squares in each puzzle have a shrunken image of another puzzle, with a link to it in the description, and these nested puzzles have a highlighted digit to bring back out with you and place over the shrunken puzzle, like how the rest of these handle boss battles. And some of these are really nested, having you drill down through like 5 layers of puzzles to find ones simple enough to intuit what the rules even are, before taking both the solution digit and your new knowledge back out with you. Relative to the rest of what's on the site, these are all pretty light and breezy, if you have enough experience with Sudoku variants to know the sort popular things the clues might be indicating. If you're going in totally cold though, it might be real hard working out how you're even supposed to start them.
What we're really here for today though is the hot new sequel here, and yeah, this makes a lot of really great improvements over the original. First and foremost, we have the "Prologue"/Tutorial puzzle here. This is its own totally independent Sudokuvania game, really, but a whole lot smaller and simpler, particularly serving to explain the basics and in particular, introduce some of the new mechanics for the proper sequel. Out of everything I've mentioned here, I'd definitely play this first.
We've got a nice quest log in the top left, with what new rules have been learned, sorted out a bit, a general progress log, and a little hand marker. Sudokuvania 2 is full of these, just so there's places you can right click and scroll around the map where you aren't going to accidentally be getting spoilers from selecting a square in the fog of war. It's a pretty breezy solve for the most part, and as you proceed it explains more rules one by one. Here's some highlights.
I've already explained overlapping grids with the original, and how bosses work, but new to the sequel and the prologue here are normal enemies. If you want a harder challenge, you CAN work out what goes in any cell with a skull through pure logic, but when you see one, you also have the option to click through like it's a boss, and do a separate puzzle to learn what goes in that square. And, notably, these largely act as simpler tutorials for whatever rule you might not understand enough to work out how to skip the fight. It's a nice built in difficulty select like that. And we also introduce the concept of rewards in cages. In this little tutorial, coins are just a fun little bonus, but maps turn up in Sudokuvania 2 proper and will clear all fog from their grid, so they make for a nice thing to aim for when you don't know here you should be working on things. There's also an item unlocked in this puzzle, and an explanation of "quest lines." Any given quest line works like the other items you find, a rule explaining what a symbol on the map means, but all quest lines are also, of course, lines. Usually you'll have one to work on at any given point in the game, and if you're ever unsure where you should be trying to make progress, the answer isn't ALWAYS to be working down a line, but it's often the case, and when you can't progress down a line for the moment, it should be very, very obvious. Anyway, these new mechanical concepts and the one item earned in the prologue are all knowledge you are expected to carry through into the game proper- Sudokuvania: Lineage of Logic. And... just for fun and because the start is honestly a bit more intimidating than the first game's, and I've seen a few people get really intimidated, let me just walk you through the first few moves here.
First, you'll notice it's a bit of a bigger map than the original. Or at least one that's more honest about its size. There's a lot less of an emphasis on bosses though. Another thing you might notice is that there is not one single number on the screen... well, besides the 2 in the title. So what do we have to work with here? Well, let's see what's up in the quest log...
There's one of those handy hands, the basic rules and tips on how to set sudokupad's settings up here, the very simple item found in the prologue, the jump shoes. Which... really just tell us that a less than/greater than symbol is exactly what you'd expect. The arrow points at the smaller number. And we have our starting quest line, the purple line, whose rule is that "segments in each region have the same sum. Clicking on that gives more info in the big floating text box, but I'll also get into it more once it's relevant.
Heading back down to the Entryway while we're all zoomed in, we have a couple of those green Jump Shoes arrows, our purple sum quest line, some hooked arrows we don't know about yet, some cages with coins, those reward you with something once you can finally solve them, half a keyhole, we don't know what that is either, and some background patterns. Each room now has its own wallpaper, which makes it a bit easier for hints to remind you of previously explored rooms being relevant again, and making it easier to tell where things overlap, something that was originally enough of a problem I had to make that illustration that's just everywhere now. We also have a weird pattern of thicker lines here, which in this specific case can be a bit confusing. Let me zoom out a bit more and doodle on these for clarity's sake.
We do not in fact have some 3x2 boxes, 2x2 boxes, and 1x1 boxes here. We've got the Entryway's 3x2 grid lines marked, I've traced over them in blue, and the overlapping Lower Hallway's more standard 3x3 gridlines which I'm showing in red, along with that area to the left, which doesn't overlap at all, so we aren't going to be creeping in there until we know what a keyhole is. Anyway, since we know everything in the entryway is 1-6, and the Lower Hallway uses the full 1-9 range, well those 6 overlapping squares are going to be the 1 2 3 4 5 and 6 for that column, and 7 8 and 9 have to be above it. OK, now what? Well, the one thing we know all the rules for is Jump Boots. A > B > C means we can eliminate some possibilities in there pretty easily...
Not the most readable pencil notes here between the quest line and my extra illustrative ones, but we know these have to be [3 4 5 or 6], [2 3 4 or 5], and [3 4 5 and 6]. That's... not a lot to go on yet. OK then, what's the story with this quest line thing? Let me clean up the screen and explain this extra clearly. So our purple questline's rule is that if we total up the value of every square the purple line has passed through since the last time it crossed a border, we always get the same total as every other segment we can isolate like that in the entire puzzle. We still don't know what it is they all total up to, but we can work out quite a bit right now. We just need to be clear about those segments. Again, the thicker line from the outlining in the next grid over can confuse things here. We'll care about THAT border later, but for now we only care about the ones for the Entryway.
This is easier to follow, right? So... down in the southwest, and up in the northeast, we have 3 boxes that need to total up to X, but down in the southeast, all but one box is on the line! That means there's only 6 possible things it could total up to. 1+2+3+4+5+6 - whichever of those is in that empty corner. So the X we're solving for is somewhere between 15 (if 6 isn't on the line) and 20 (if 1 isn't on it). You can probably guess what the total's going to be just at a glance now, but this is a big logic puzzle, not a big educated guess puzzle! Can we prove it? Well, let's do a little proof. What's the absolute highest sum we can get with just 3 digits, from 1-6? That'd be our 3 highest options. So... 4+5+6=15. Oh look, it's our minimum value! This is a huge breakthrough.
It's worth noting that there's at least one boss/enemy puzzle later on that also uses these sum lines, and in that, there is more than one contiguous line, and each line can have a different sum all the segments need to add up to. But here on the main map, we know for a fact that there is one single purple quest line snaking through the map, so we can upgrade the rule for it that every segment specifically has to sum to 15. So we know the blue and orange sections' segments of the line have to be 4 5 6, and that the pink section has to be 1 2 3 4 5. So we can place that 6 and do more logic all over this place. Let me clean up again.
If we've got 456 on the bottom left, we must have 123 in the bottom right. We know where the 6 is, and hey, placing that removed a bit of fog for us. We know we also need a 456 for that upper line segment, and two of the three squares are in line with the 6, so, we know where that 6 is too now. And those Jump symbols already eliminated the chance of there being a 1 in two of those slots, and the three, so we can mostly solve that whole box. 3, 2, 1. But hang on. Before I pop those into place, what did that fog clear out? We have the whole bounding box for the next line segment there. Remember not to get thrown by the overlapping rooms. From where we enter the southwest box in the Lower Hallway, we've got 3 squares before it crosses into the next box over, and we just solved the 1 in there too. So... A+B=15-1. That needs to be one of these pairs over there then: 7+7 (nope, that's illegal), 6+8 (nope, we already have a 6 in this box) or 5+9. And oh, one of those is less than whatever is to the right of it, and 9 isn't less than anything, unless we somehow end up with 2 digit numbers in this Sudoku puzzle later somehow anyway. So filling stuff in...
There's some interesting things going on here. Basic Sudoku rules tell us where the northeast 3 is in the Entryway (can't be in line with the 3 we placed, we worked out we have a 5 and a 6 over on the right, so there's just one place left for it to go. This, by the way, is the last thing we are going to be working out in the entryway for a Very Long Time. There's no more fog, there's no contradictions if we poke around. We need to know what a hooked arrow means (or maybe the keyhole), and it'll be forever until we pick those items up. So don't sweat it, but remember to come back when you've seen those. Now though we need to get clear on the edge cases of our quest line rule.
We of course have a pretty literal edge case. We've got 3 boxes in the northeast of the entryway with the line, 6+[4+5]. And we've got 3 boxes in the central west box for the Lower Hallway, [4+5]+a third value. It's 6. Wait, don't we already have a 6 in that row? No, we don't. That 6 is fully in the Entryway, this box is fully in the Lower Hall. The 4 and 5 have to fit with everything all around them in both rooms, because they're in the overlap, but the rest of the Lower Hallway does not care at all what's going on in the Entryway, so this is fine.
What about the rest of the fog we just removed? The line we have coming in is from the left side, then going out the top... but we've got more of it in here. So SOMEHOW it's going to curve back around and come back through here, right? We're pretty nice about hints that are partially in the fog about making it at least a bit clear what they're doing on there. Quest lines only made turns from the dead center of a square, and it never crosses back over itself. So we're definitely coming back into the northeast corner through the middle, down, then diagonally off and to the the right. So... that's 6 squares in this box that have to total to 15? No. This is a pretty clever way of clearing that up, because that would be impossible. We cross into this segment and hit just these two boxes before crossing back out (it's gotta be 7+8 because we can't place a 9). Then at some point, we're going to cross into this box again in that foggy corner, and yeah, we're definitely hitting those 4 other squares before that second line segment in this box gets terminated by the border again. And while I'm clearing stuff up, there are 4 other quest lines eventually, but none of them do this sum thing. Different quest line, different rule. They'll be explained when you reach the appropriate point in the plot, don't worry if you see them a bunch before then.
And of course we know that if we're using a 7 and 8 there,the only thing greater is 9, giving us that square... the rest of that segment can only be 1+2+3... there's some more you can work out from there of course, but as I add these in, fog reveals our first normal enemy. Again, if you properly logic things out, you can work out what goes in that square like any other, but if you can't figure it out, click the square for a link to nice normal-ish 3x3 sudoku grid with pre-filled numbers and everything that'll help you learn more about what you can do with Jump Shoes specifically.
I'm noting, of course, that there are pre-filled numbers in normal monster fights, because you will almost never see a single pre-filled number otherwise. There's a really cute gimmick where one grid is the outlying town, where all of the citizens have been kidnapped. Scattered around the rest of the map, there's little person icons in cages, like the map that was just revealed here, with the symbol for yet another item we don't have yet. Fill in one of those person cages, and that citizen (the digit you just filled in) appears somewhere in the town grid, with a little ! in the corner to let you know that if you select them, they have dialog for you. It's freaking adorable really. Otherwise, no numbers, only tools and quest lines. And weird rules applying to specific grids. The one that gave me cause to remind you that technically values higher than 9 MIGHT be on a grid somewhere, somehow, is particularly nasty to deal with.
I think that covers all the major features, so, personal anecdote and final review time! I actually got a little bit of a head start on this one. Two days before it officially released, Skeptical Mario tossed me a DM on bluesky with an early preview link as thanks for how no really, I was not kidding when I said if you've heard of Sudokuvania, it's probably because of my older blog post on here. That's legitimately where nearly all traffic to the first game came from. Now as it happens, a lifetime or two ago, I used to professionally review games. So when I got that early preview link, old instincts kicked in, I went super super quiet like I was under an NDA, and spent those two head start days trying to clear the whole thing by formal release day. Yeah that absolutely did not happen. I took 8 days to get through this one... and I might have cheated a bit on the last couple bosses to so I could write this up before the weekend was over.
Meanwhile, the original Sudokuvania took me a full two weeks, with a lot less time taken off to work and get new glasses and various other things I've had going on. Also I ABSOLUTELY had to cheat past several bosses in that one, including the very first. That said, I don't know that I'd necessarily call the sequel easier. Like I demonstrated above, you really need to put on your thinking cap just to get the first digit placed on the grid, and there's some nasty tricks in some later rooms. Overall though, the difficulty here is a lot more EVEN. It's starts off pretty tricky, but so long as you remember all the rules you're working with and apply them, there's only a few places you might have to think several moves ahead to progress, and while some bosses are pretty tricky knots to solve, I never hit one where I just stared at the screen with no idea where to start. That said there IS one optional super boss where after several hours I had exactly one value filled in. I'll maybe come back to that one some day.
I was stuck for a pretty long time because I straight up did not see one of those hooked arrows while looking for an entry point to a room fairly late in the game. I had a big long stretch where I was worried I'd missed something because there is just a long stretch in the middle with no bosses, no new tools, and having to plug a LOT of values into fogged squares, but again, just a super well designed puzzle, with some good jokes here and there in the plot text, too.
