Finity review - a gorgeous puzzler that pits you against your own inelegance

eurogamer.net:

It can be odd to discover, over time, what a game is really about. Finity is a match-three game for Apple Arcade. It delights in pastel colours and endless chiming sound effects. But what it's actually about is that crucial element of first-person shooters and MMO raids. Finity is about target priorisation.

This is because, at any give moment, you might be able to make a handful of matches with the tiles on your four-by-four grid. But which match should you make? Might some be better than others? Might some be much, much worse? These simple questions turn a good game into a great one. I am still working out how to untangle it all.

The basics are simple. You have that four-by-four grid with blocks of various colours. You match blocks by shifting rows or columns, with matched blocks vanishing and creating room for new blocks to fall into view. Matches build a meter during each level, which eventually creates three special blocks that must be matched to move on to the next level. Fine.

But Finity, as the name suggests, deals in the finite. It hangs back and drops pebbles into the abyss. So there are limiting factors to all of this. Every time you move a block, in a row or column, its timer counts down. When its timer is done, the block is locked in place, which means its row or column cannot be moved anymore. This happens in stages, thankfully — first the block will be locked into either horizontal or vertical movement, but move it again and it will be locked in place completely and that's done. The only way to get rid of it from that point on is to match it.

So you don't just have to make matches, you have to make them thoughtfully. You have to be elegant, because your inelegance results in moves that do not remove