I love this app and the puzzles - I have spent hours playing. However, I’ve gotten to the point where I would love to replay but the empty stars just doesn’t give the same feeling of progression because the number on the pack select menu doesn’t change. I’ve tried deleting multiple ways, but something about the way it’s saved in iCloud makes it impossible. Please please please give the option to completely reset progress.

I absolutely love the channel and solving puzzles. I don’t pretend to be the same level of genius as people who complete these puzzles within an hour but o knew I could try my hand at some puzzles and slowly build a skill set. Although the puzzles so far have been brutally challenging, I have found it to be an enjoyable experience for the most part. However. The one thing that is making some levels absolutely horrible experiences are the hints. The hints themselves often require leaps of logic that are in no way clear to the untrained eye. I will read some hints that claim something that I cannot for the life of mean prove to be true or understand and I don’t feel it’s right to make progress off of logic I don’t understand so I get stuck. The hints NEED to be readdressed and modified for anyone at any skill level. Although I already said I’m not a genius, I’m can say with a certain level of confidence that I am rather intelligent but it was still very very rough at times.

I love the variant sudoku is available through here and the intuitive app layout. Some of them are so hard that the hints don’t seem to make any sense because they just states are gonna be true without any explanation. Greater detail in the hints would be very helpful.Most importantly, I really wish that all the different packs were integrated into one app on my phone. I’m happy to keep paying the same amount per pack of puzzles, five dollars for Thermo, five dollars per knight pack, etc. But having a whole bunch of different apps to switch through is complicated to figure out which puzzle I want, where it is, and it and clutters up my phone. I really like that this version they released has multiple packs to buy within it, and I hope that they keep adding other options for in app purchases within this one app.

The puzzles are great, but the update is making things hard to enjoy them. I love that the newest update included a new set of puzzles, but the quality of life changes certainly hurt my enjoyment of the app. I particularly miss the eraser (I realize the backspace key functions as an eraser, but it visually is less intuitive than an actual eraser icon) and the bulk erase trash bin, but the layout change is also distracting and unwieldy - in landscape mode, the puzzle is shoved as far to the left of the screen as possible with an awkward dead space on the right with the inputs below it. Why the forward/reverse, back, setting, and hint boxes aren’t in the dead space, I don’t know - instead they’re squashed between the puzzle and the number keys, making the bottom right of the screen very visually cluttered.

In so many puzzles, there will be a hint such as “r2c8 can only be 9”, and if you go to input 9 into r2c8, it’s just flat out wrong. Probably around 40% of the puzzles, I would say, contain uninterpretable typos, including mislabeling cell positions (saying r5c6 when they mean r6c5, or saying r5c6 when they mean r4c6). Additionally, even many of the clues that aren’t just fully wrong are still vague and unhelpful, assuming leaps of logic, causing me to get to the point where I just have to abandon many of the puzzles because there’s nowhere left for me to make progress. And then I don’t have enough stars to unlock new puzzles, so I often just have to manually put in random numbers until I fill out the grid of one puzzle so I can finish it and unlock new ones.

I wrote a review a few days after this came out and it seems to have been lost, so I will try again. I have been excitedly awaiting this app for the last few months that Mark and Simon have been teasing it on their channel, and it has certainly lived up to the anticipation! These new variants are a fun challenge, expanding my skill set and teaching my brain new strategies and methods of logic to solve them. The Cracking The Cryptic collection are by far my favorite Sudoku apps, and I highly recommend this one and all their previous releases as well (Classic, Sandwich, Killer, Thermo, Arrow, Chess, Miracle). That’s enough reviewing from me - I have puzzles to solve. Say it with me now: let’s get cracking!

I love Cracking the Cryptic, and the puzzles they have in the app are truly fantastic. The app has great marking features (two forms of pencil marking and colors) for solving these difficult puzzles as well. However, it eats battery like crazy and has (relatively) few puzzles for the price tag on each pack. Battery Life: 100% battery on my iPhone 14 Pro Max gets drained to ~50% after only a couple hours of play. Puzzle updates: I appreciate that they are hand crafted and manually hinted, but updates are frustratingly few and far between. I would love to play puzzles from videos here instead of Sudoku Pad (which doesn’t always import correctly), even without hints, for more content and variety.

I love this app and play it almost every single day, but the lack of editing on the clues is beyond frustrating. Puzzle 45, which I’m replaying today, doesn’t just have a typo, which is unfortunately somewhat common, but clues 2 and 3 are flat out incorrect and will not let you solve the puzzle if you follow them. Also, please include a few clues on the bonus pack puzzles. Valentine’s Day #1 I have never been able to solve without finally having to guess after filling in all possibilities around the grid with the clues given. Please have a tester go through and identify all of the typos. A beginner who is relying on the clues to proceed is going to be very frustrated and give up if they don’t figure out that the row and column numbers were transposed for a given clue.

Love CTC and love this app. The voice in my head turns into Simon's every time I play and I love it! These puzzles are so relaxing but also stimulating and satisfying.Is there any way you could add a button to the control panel to un-select all currently selected cells? I frequently want to do this to reduce the visual clutter on the board after I do some pencil marking, so I can take stock of how my markings changed things. Currently I have to reach up into the grid and unselect cells manually.Maybe a config to make holding the multi-select button clear selected cells by default? Or clear selected cells if cells are selected?

The harder puzzles are quite difficult. After an hour I tend to start looking at hints because I just want to get through it. So many times I read a hint that does not apply to the puzzle at all. Give a step by step solution or don’t bother. For example “colouring the 7s reveals that XYZ can’t go in rXcY.” And at the point I’m at it simply doesn’t reveal anything, but there’s no logic or explanation before that hint so there’s nothing you can do but plug the numbers in… and then you might as well be entering data into a grid. Frustrating enough for me to write a review which I almost never do.