Shade Spotter is a timed puzzle app based on being able to pick up on different shades of different colours. Sound dumb ? Don’t worry, it’s insanely addicting and tough.
The concept of Shade Spotter is very simple: you are given a screen of coloured tiles, and you need to tap the one which is a different shade to the rest, with the aim being to find as many as possible in the set time. As you answer one correctly, the next screen will have more tiles, and so on, making it more and more complex each time… but if you get one wrong, it’s game over! There are three levels of difficulty to choose from, with the hardest level involving different shaped tiles too. When time runs out, you’ll be given your score of how many you got right – and it’s really as simple as that.
It’s been claimed in the past that puzzles can ‘train your brain’, keep your mind fit and even help towards preventing Alzheimer’s; scientists are constantly investigating lifespan vs. ‘brainspan’ to see if and how we can improve our brain’s functions. Whether you believe in keeping your brain agile, or just like to fill 5 minutes of your time, puzzles are highly popular both in terms of physical ones and apps.
It’s always recommended to start off on the easiest mode in this game. Different colors have different difficulties when it comes to finding the shaded square, so starting off on easy mode can help you figure out the hard and easy colors easier, and how much of a color difference to look for. Of course, colors get closer together as the game goes on, but that’s what the practice is for.
With medium and hard modes, it’s very hard to tell the color. Make sure that your screen is as clean as absolutely possible or else the smudges and dirt will go a long way in obscuring the appearance of the screen, thus making it much more difficult to tell which squares are the shaded ones.
Still need an edge? Start messing with the settings in your phone. Turn the brightness up and down. Tilt the screen to one side or the other to change the glare on the screen, as sometimes tilting it from side to side can bring out the color differences on really hard levels.
Beyond that, there are even more settings that you can mess with on your phone. Go to the accessibility settings and try all of them. Put on the grayscale, or increase the contrast on your phone. You can even try inverting the colors, or using the zoom function to make each of the squares just a litle bit bigger. Or try messing with all of the settings at the same time just to see how you do.
Getting sick of the ads? All that you have to do to make them go away for free is to switch your phone or tablet into airplane mode, or to turn off the WiFi if that is your only data connection. Generally it’s not recommended to do that, though, as the ads are the developers’ livelihood and will pay for the creation of more games.
Shade Spotter was developed by Apex Apps, and was released in December 2014. It’s currently available on Android and iOS devices. It’s a free game powered by pop-up ads, which appear in between games. This puzzle comes with background music by default, which can also be turned off (I highly recommend you do turn it off – I’ll come to that later). Whilst it’s very responsive and quick to bring up your next screen of tiles, making it fast-paced and adding to the timed aspect, the layout and fonts themselves aren’t particularly anything special. Most of the colours are pretty bright though, on a ‘metallic’ grey gradient background, so the tiles stand out and are easy to see. There are no achievements to be earned on Shade Spotter, your only challenge is to beat your own high score for each level of difficulty. You can see me giving it a go in the video below.
As you may have guessed, this app is unlikely to be suitable for someone who suffers from colour blindness. Colour vision deficiency affects 8% of men and 0.5% of women, roughly 2.7 million people in Britain today. Where the difference between some shades could still be easy to spot, there are some colours which may cause problems in this situation as the differences are so subtle. It appears I wasn’t the only one thinking this, as app developer GuoRong Den has released Shade Spotter King (Color Blind) as a follow-up to their shade-spotting app.
If you like to challenge yourself with these kinds of apps, then I’d definitely recommend you give it a go, especially if you’re a fan of games such as Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training. Shade Spotter is a free app, and you can get it here on iOS and Android.
it’s been recognised for a long time that the brain is a muscle and like any other muscle, if you don’t use it you lose it.
Have you tried Shade Spotter? Will you be giving it a go? Let me know what you think in the comments below.