I woke up this morning to the soft pitter patter of long awaited rain and cloudy, overcast skies. The melodrama of the moment had me yawning exaggeratedly, arms outstretched, and then I shuffled my plaid, argyle socks to the kitchen where I began my morning routine of brewing a cup of tea, with milk and honey. Waiting for the tea to cool enough to drink, I opened my laptop, checked the day’s assignments, and saw that Handy Games had just requested a review for their iPhone game infeCCT, a Mayan-themed puzzle game. Now, if there’s anything more perfect for a rainy day than tea and a cozy quilt, perhaps a fire, it’s puzzles to pass the time.

infeCCTt is absolutely infectious. I’m a sucker for anything Mayan inspired (hellooo anthropology student), so a puzzle game set within a Mayan temple scheme, with budding flowers and ropey grass vines was just icing on the cake. The music sets the tone nicely, with thumping hand beats on a taut skin drum and a high-pitched flute breaking up the otherwise very tribal sounds. The music isn’t incredibly epic like in StoneLoops of Jurassica – that game made you feel like every move had earth-shattering, tachycardia consequences – but it’s certainly lively enough to keep you engaged, with blood pumping. The other sounds in the game, of the vine moving, the temple doors opening and closing with their craggy, rocky reverberations, are the cherry atop the icing, they’re so wonderful and satisfying to hear.

The playing field can be a 6×8 square grid for the larger, more involved puzzles, or a 4×6 grid for the easier, training puzzles, with other grid numbers in between. The object of the game is to extend your ropey, vine line around the entire course of the playing field, never looping over a square you’ve already used, until all the squares have been used up. Simple enough, right? Not so. The training grids instill a sense of accomplishment, a gung ho bravado, before the game unleashes the more difficult puzzles that leave you scratching your head and eyeballing the question mark button that gives you the answer. Sometimes you just need the answer, after frustrating time spent feeling more and more inept, even if it means you’re not allotted any points for skipping the solution on your own. Each grid playing arena has blue, stone squares you must navigate around, and in the more difficult puzzles, there are crosshatched squares that indicate you must navigate over the square a second time, from a different angle of approach. Should you make a mistake, backtracking is easy enough by tapping on the square you’d like to return to, leaving behind a wake of whirling black holes on the wrongly footed squares. However, take note: backtracking more than one step will have negative repercussions in points. Take back more than one move and you’ll be docked 10 points per additional square you track back on. These point deductions can really add up when you decide, near the end of your loopy vine, that you made a mistake somewhere and should start over. Of course, completing a course earns you oodles of points, especially if you complete it in quick astuteness, which can potentially tack on a few hundred extra points.

Strategy is tantamount to this game, as should be obvious. It’s easy to want to take a breather and intelligently examine the playing field, and plot a committed course after you’re sure it’s the correct one. The only problem with this pre-plotted strategy is it can oftentimes lead to too much downtime, preventing you from earning bonus points in the time trials. The Mayans certainly wouldn’t like that. No, the Mayans were an impetuous lot, roughhousing in their I-shaped ball courts where they played a maddeningly fast-paced game of slapping hard balls against their hips and shins, in some extraordinarily futile attempt to swoosh the ball through a stone hoop nearly the exact circumfurance of the ball. If anything, when it came to games the Mayans were about speed and persistence, trial and error. I found the best way to approach infeCCt’s puzzles are to quickly oversee the entire grid, then start tracing a line. More often than not, instinct serves to guide you accurately, and time trial points will be awarded in full. With plenty of these quickly solved puzzles under you belt, you’ll have enough points to give you some leeway during the harder puzzles when a few steps in error only set you back a few hundred. You’ll be unlocking the more complex puzzles before you know it.

The greatest downfall of the game is its astronomical price. Most puzzles games never cost more than $2.99, so I was intensely surprised to see infeCCt costing $9.99. Hopefully, they’ll have a sale soon, or offer a free version with limited levels, or hell, just drop the price.

Despite its odd name, with the odd capitalization of CC that only serves to remind me of medical syringe volumes, infeCCt is a great game that will keep you entertained for days upon days. It may or may not be based on actual Mayan puzzles, but given the intelligence and skilled nature of the Mayan civilization, it’s not too far a stretch of the imagination. The game is lively, entertaining, and has great longevity with over 300 puzzles; who knows, maybe after our civilization’s demise an archaeologist from a different planet in the year 4050 will have the technology to restart an iPhone, and find that infeCCt is still as clever as ever.

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