Ultimate Puzzles Animals 3

In Brief
Ultimate Puzzles Animals 3 is a simple 16 square piece's jigsaw puzzle with five images and no lugs. You can see a video of game play HERE

The Game
Ultimate Puzzles: Animals 3 is another of those jigsaw puzzles from UniDen with square shaped puzzle pieces that have no lugs. There is one tiny different, well a 20% difference because we get five images to solve instead of four. The theme is African animals. We've had several of these types of puzzle games previously from the developer UniDen, i.e. America, Countries, France, Nature, Nature 2, Animals 2, China and Japan as well as a few other non jigsaw games such as Knight's Tetris, and Legend of the Fallen Castle 1 & 2.

Each of the five puzzles is made up of 16 square pieces. which are placed on a 4 x 4 grid i.e. 16 pieces. You can turn each piece by clicking on it to bring it to the right orientation; this does add to the game somewhat with respect to difficulty as it can take longer to get the right orientation. The pieces only turn clockwise. Once a puzzle piece has been placed in the correct position, it locks in place. If you try to place a piece on an element of the grid that it doesn't belong on, it will jump back to the periphery where other pieces are located. Pieces will be randomly placed when you re do the puzzle. You can restart any of the puzzles at any time by clicking on the back arrow.

All five puzzles are relatively simple. An adult could easily complete the whole game in around 10 to 15 minutes at the very least. I think the developer is asking far too much over on Itch.io for just five jigsaw images at $5 per game. If all of the series were to be combined, it would seem a fairer price, but there are free jigsaw programs available online that in my opinion are much better than this; (okay it's free today). We were given a jigsaw puzzle called Infinite Jigsaw Puzzle Feb 13th 2008 which allowed your own images to be added to the puzzle, plus had several jig saw shapes and you could adjust the difficulty from around 25 pieces to over a thousand. You could also categorise images as well. I've still got that puzzle and sometimes dip into it, with several hundred images added over the years I've had it. I'd buy it from the original developer if I could find them (Media Research Group).

Other Free Games
The latest game from Epic called The Lion's Song a narrative adventure game is now live HERE . Next weeks game that unlocks on the 20th May 21 hasn't been announced yet.

Please see Delenns threads for Steam and Non Steam freebies HERE and HERE respectively. It’s worth adding these to your favorites and checking regularly for available freebies. Most are only free for a specific time. If you miss the deadline you’ll miss out. Once added to your account, it’s yours to keep. Delenn has recently posted details of three Steam games that are temporarily free. One may be until it leaves early access??? - i.e. Tower Ball - Incremental Tower Defense plus are Keyboard Killers still free but Galaxium a Space Invader game and Dream Machine: Chapter 1 & 2 were just removed at 6pm UK time today.

You'll find hundreds of freeware games of all arcade and indie genres on Itch.io and Caimans Games as well as other sources. Please do check out the game discussion forums for older posts HERE (the sticky section is useful). Many of the earlier posts may be out of date with respect to the links I and others have provided to the free games; however, you only need to know the name of the game to find most of them via other sources. Many of those games from 2008 to around 2017 were posted as part of a project to supplement the lack of weekday games when the game giveaway went to weekend only games around Easter 2008 (mainly instigated due to the financial crisis of 2008) until November 2018 when Falcoware stepped into the weekday slot; however, from around 2015 onwards we did start to get the occasional Steam key for various games offered as limited giveaways, with a restriction on the number of keys available (anywhere from 25 to 2000+). These included over 60 decent AAA games and indie arcade games ; for example some of the better AAA games included , lucky Warhammer: Vermintide 1 & 2 plus DLC for version 2; Dreadlands, Mount & Blade: Warband, Immortal Unchained and Conan Exiles.

I've not posted details of any Indie Gala freebies since my older computer went on the Fritz back in October last year. Since then Indie Gala have added quite a few more free games, some of which are definitely worth downloading. You can find the latest freebies HERE and their showcase list, which includes all the freebies still current; (many of which have been included for a couple of years now) HERE.

It’s worth adding these links to your favorites and checking regularly for available freebies. Most are only free for a specific time. If you miss the deadline you’ll miss out. Once added to your account, they are yours to keep. :)

Notes on Security
I scanned a zipped copy of the installed game and it found zero hits from 58 antimalware engines. The downloaded executable may include some low level adware that only opens your browser to Falcowares home page after the game has installed, but does not inject any malware into your system. When your browser is opened to Falcowares home page it earns them some money, part of which is given to the developer of the game for allowing the game to be given away free. You can see the results of the scan via the following link:

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/9492cf8bca6ab93464ecb76991184f792f662ae56481e516a7cdeb7acdc7f2a7/detection