Monday Mind Teasers: GROW Games

Anyone beatlast week’smind teaser yet? Didn’t think so. Okay, no more games until we get past that hellacious hurdle — see you next week!

Okay, okay, okay. I’m not that cruel. But I am cruel enough to introduce you to the GROW game series. Not just one of them. Not just the hardest one. ALL of them. Dtoid reader and fellow mind teaser masterCoughreminded me of a wonderful flash game series I had forgotten all about. Since the first time I played a GROW game there have been at least half a dozen new additions to the series and I spent this whole past week beating them one by one. Trust me when I say this game series contains some of the most pleasing puzzles on the Internet.

Here’s how they work: The whole game consists of only six, eight, ten or more buttons, and all you have to do is click on them in the right order. At first you assume you’re about to powerhouse a simple puzzle, but then you quickly realize six buttons means six factorial, a.k.a. “6!”, which means 65432*1=720 possible paths to the end, with only one rewarding you with the “correct” outcome. To help you find the intended ending, each button levels up if certain buttons are pressed after it correctly, and you watch an elaborate animated scene unfold in front of you as you try to figure out if you’re getting warmer or colder. If a button reaches its max level, it usually either means you clicked it too early, or you were supposed to click another key button before this button, causing its environmental effect to be completely useless.

To say anything more than that would ruin the fun. In fact, I don’t even recommend checking out the screenshots below. The majority of the fun comes from seeing how much detail can be sucked out of just a boring sphere or cube environment as an entire community grows and expands. Hit the jump for the full list of GROW game links fromEyezMaze.

Battlefield 6 aiming RPG at a helicopter