Hexcells is, on the most basic level, a more sophisticated version of Minesweeper. You are given a layout of golden hex tiles, possibly with one or more of them already highlighted or flipped. Flipped tiles have numbers on them, and also labels indicating whether or not adjacent tiles which should be highlighted are continuous or non-continuous (or no designator at all). There are also row and column labels which allow you to see how many tiles need to be highlighted in any given row or column.
Each puzzle mixes these up in a unique way to push you to solve it.
Thinking about this game as a more sophisticated version of minesweeper is, I think, fairly ideal, because that is more or less what it is, and the function it serves. It is something to throw away a bit of time on, not sit down and play continuously.
But even then, you’re not looking at it taking all that long to complete; the whole game takes less than two and a half hours to solve, and that’s assuming you’re trying to get a perfect score on every stage.
It is about as fun as Minesweeper is, and I’d basically consider it filling that role in your game library.
My advice? Pass. It isn’t a bad puzzle game, but it isn’t anything remarkable either. If you did get it as part of a bundle or something, it isn’t a terrible thing to install and just screw around with when you’d mess around with solitaire or minesweeper or whatever, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy this.
But hey, if you're trying to achievement hunt, it is super easy to 100%.
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