Killer Sudoku CTC

Love the app, but can’t find a way to reset it and start over again

All of CTC's Sudoku apps have beautiful puzzles and excellent tools. My only request for their Killer (and Sandwich) Sudoku is to include list exclusion (in the given lists of sums) in the undo stack. I will often run aground and need to undo myself back a bit, and I lose my thread of deduction when the lists I've grayed out don't revert. If this is a known challenge for UX (it might appear that nothing happened), I would suggest showing (and flashing?) the sums panel when undoing those exclusions. I give it 5 stars regardless, but knowing how thoughtful they are I thought I would offer this request for future updates!

Killer sudoku are IMO the best variant, due tom the sheer variety of logical techniques the setter and solver can explore. These puzzles are really fantastic. Every one is thoughtfully crafted, each infused with a delightfully unique structure and narrative. The puzzle interface is simple but effective, with a sophisticated hint system designed to teach new solving techniques. All in all this app feels like a labor of love. Couldn't recommend it more highly.

Best interface of any killer sudoku app on the market. Big problem, though. The puzzles authored by “Cracking the Cryptic” are much more difficult than puzzles rated similarly by other authors. Since this was developed by CTC, it would seem that they are not good judges of their own puzzles. It leads to random difficulty spikes that are frustrating for players like myself just learning the ropes.

Love the puzzles in this app, but after the last update, the app is unusable in landscape mode (iphone 13 pro max). Clues are automatically displayed and when they are, they're just a tall and skinny column that you can't even read. It's a small bug that completely destroys the app's usability.

Great sudoku app with many well thought out puzzles. One knock is how battery draining the app seems to be. Maybe chosing to build something this simple on Unity was not the right choice?

The app is beautiful, however I don’t like the puzzles so much. Most of them require brute force solving. By that I mean you have to take a guess and keep going until you hit a contradiction, then you guess again.

I enjoy Cracking The Cryptic variations on Sudoku puzzles and spend more time than I’d like to admit playing them. Sometimes when playing the more difficult puzzles, I look to the hints to get insight as to how to solve them. Many times, the hints are vague and do not help to understand the step. I get that it may be text length limited but if it doesn’t help, why bother. Keep making these puzzles while trying to help with better hints for solutions.

The puzzles are well designed and extremely challenging! Unfortunately, if you’re not as smart as the Cracking The Cryptic crew, the in-game hints often seem to be focused on conserving space over explaining their logic, which often leads to hints asserting facts not in obvious evidence, which doesn’t help the user understand what they’re doing wrong.

I’ve really been enjoying this app. It is well made and the puzzles range from easy to very difficult. I’d mostly recommend this. My biggest “complaint” is the hint system. Smart hints are nice, but often will tell me things I already know. “Regular” hints… well they use a lot of jargon and state things that are not obvious and give free explanations. Some puzzles are better than others, but as the difficulty ramps up I’m finding the hints harder to follow. The hint may say these four cells need to be a 6/7/8/9 quadruple or that these two cells must add up to 4, but I have no idea how they got to those limitations. As such, I’m not learning any new strategies. (And sometimes the hints are leave me completely confused.) I did get this app a second time on my android tablet so I could play on a larger screen. Currently the syncing function will sync or merge progress, but it does set your completion times to 999:59 for all your puzzles. (Or at least it did for me.)