The game features word snippets in five-by-five tiles that players must match to create the best words.
Unfortunately, I hate the game.
I hate its guts.
Sure, Quartiles tries to make you feel good by having your rank go up for every correct word, but it’s probably one of the most agonizing word puzzles that you can get into with iOS 17.5Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
It seems Apple is gunning for theNew York Times new bread and butter,namely the NYT Game app.
The Cupertino, California company could have made a Wordle or Tiles clone in that effort.
First, I should mention that all word-based puzzle games have a steep or even impossible learning curve.
Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
A good puzzle game introduces you to its mechanics before gradually complicating each puzzle.
For the most part, the NYT nor Apples puzzle games offer any onramp to do better eventually.
Ive played my share of the NYT Games.
Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
I vastly prefer the latter.
Open-ended puzzle games are much more difficult to manage than those with a strict endpoint.
How to Play Quartiles
Apples Quartiles is Spelling Bee, only exponentially worse.
In Quartiles, youre stuck in an infinite loop of choice paralysis.
Its a pain, and its not fun.
The game doesnt evolve; it revolves.
No matter what I did, I felt like I was stuck spinning my wheels.
Hell, I would rather play Wordle than this mess.
You also need to pay for Apple News+ to get access to the game.
In that case, stash your money for any number ofpuzzle games that are designed with real intentbehind them.
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