The tranquility of nature goes well with picnics, love, and long hikes. It also goes well with visual puzzles, as you’ll quickly discover once you lose yourself in Kiloo’s Zenses Rainforest 3-in-1.
Zenses Rainforest 3-in-1 features (sit down for this one) three puzzle games in one app. All three OpenFeint-enabled puzzles are simple to grasp and burrow into. In fact, they might remind you of some of the shape-matching you used to engage in as a kindergartner. That’s not a slight against Zenses. The game’s puzzles are meant to be stress-free and relaxing, and for the most part, they’re a perfect cap to a stressful day.
The puzzles are named “Waterfall,” “Water Lily,” and “Sunflower”, and each one is labeled entirely in lower-case in order to be, y’know, extra-mellow. In “Waterfall,” differently-colored shapes float slowly down a watery cascade. The shapes– triangles, squares, and circles– come in different sizes, too. Your job is to “build” a complete shape by nesting the shapes: For instance, a small triangle goes inside a medium triangle, which goes inside a big triangle. If a shape is completed successfully, you score a point. After you score a certain number of points within a time limit, you move on to the next stage. If two incomplete shapes touch one another, they disappear.
We’re struck with an urge to shop at Target.
In “Water Lily,” you must use pieces shaped like triangles, quadrilaterals, and pentagons to fill an awkwardly-shaped shadow (or shadows) on a water lily. Water Lily is an especially strong reminder of the weird stuff we used to build as schoolkids with sets of wooden polygon-shaped blocks.
The last game, “Sunflower,” is also the simplest to learn. You navigate several sunflower-shaped pieces through a maze by flipping the screen in different directions. When the pieces are all touching one another, you move on to the next challenge.
On their own, neither Waterfall, Water Lily, nor Sunflower will keep you busy forever. But put together in one package, it’s easy to jump from one game to another as soon as it suits you. The game’s gentle ambiance, which is decorated with ripping water and flower garlands, is also enjoyable.
Zenses is not a high-pressure puzzle challenge, but it’s not meant to be. If you’d like something slower, something based less on numbers and logic and more on the childish pleasure of matching up shapes, lose yourself in the forest.