Jabeh, a beautiful shinro-style game from Arash Payan, gives many reasons for puzzle fans to pick this game up today.

Jabeh presents the player with an 8 x 8 grid of squares, upon which are several arrows pointing at hidden blue stones. Your task is to uncover the location of the 12 hidden stones using the arrows as clues. Each row and column has a number indicating how many stones are in each. The arrows point toward the location of one or more stones, which may be right next to the arrow or across the board. By eliminating squares that cannot contain stones, you should be able to logically narrow down the possibilities until all locations present themselves. Once you’ve uncovered all 12 stones, the gameboard disappears and the formerly translucent background fades into the foreground in full color, a simple yet pleasant reward for a job well done. All puzzles can be solved purely through logical thinking.

Currently, there are 174 total puzzles available (103 easy, 41 medium, and 30 hard puzzles), according to http://www.twitter.com/jabeh. Arash adds new puzzles from time to time, and Jabeh will check for newly available puzzles each time it starts. The graphics are superb, with a very polished, appealing look. The soundtrack cycles through 10 pleasant tracks, all of which are available for free from www.jabeh.org. The controls are flawless. Tap once to rule out a square or drag to rule out several at once. Double-tap to mark the stone squares. Tap again to clear if necessary. Even if you drag your finger over several squares which may include squares that were already ruled out, they remained ruled out rather than flip to a stone. Very intuitive and very well done, Arash! Most shinro-style games utilize fluky controls or annoying systems that require tapping a switch to determine whether your taps will select stones or rule out squares. They pull you out of the game and usually result in confusion. Jabeh is like a ray of sun on a cloudy day.

Replay value is fairly high despite the somewhat low number of available puzzles. Each time you solve a puzzle, even if you’ve previously solved the puzzle, it counts as a win in your statistics. The more you play, the better your results. While there are a couple of other similar games in the app store, nothing comes close to the polish and pleasure of playing Jabeh.

Jabeh gets our AppSmile 5-Dimple rating: