Hitori! A puzzle game with 1000 levels

Hitori is a logic puzzle game where you have to eliminate duplicate numbers in columns and rows.

This post briefly describes game rules and an App I released in 2019.

What is Hitori?

Hitori is a logic puzzle game played on a grid of numbers, just like Sudoku. Instead of filling the grid with numbers, you eliminate them. It is one of the Japanese Nikoli puzzles.

Rules

The game is played on a square grid of numbers. You need to cut out duplicate numbers in rows and in columns, but you cannot cut them out horizontally adjacent or vertically adjacent (diagonally adjacent is fine). Remaining cells must form a single connected area.

Why make a clone?

I really liked playing Hitori in one of the mobile puzzling games, but there were only like 30 puzzles in the app. There also were no good alternatives on the Play Store at the time.

I also was interested at the time in level generation algorithms and was learning UI in Unity, so I thought it would be a great exercise.

Implementation

I spent around a month developing the first version. It included 1000 levels, a basic save system, a nice dark-themed UI, and a slick solution checking animation.

Back then I didn't know C# yet, so I wrote the level generation in JavaScript!

Updates

Every couple of years I came back and added new features to the Game. I improved the level generation, added a Settings menu, basic sounds, and a Light Theme.

Play for free

The game is free to play, links to Play Store, and Web builds here: Hitori