Clear Arrows Start game

Plan ahead or just start tapping? What your solving path says about your style

Psychology of the game

By Dirk Werner, Dipl.-Psych., Psychologischer Psychotherapeut (licensed in Germany)

Published on · Last updated on

One puzzle, five ways through

Give five people the same level, and all five will solve it. But none of them will do it the same way. One looks at the board for half a minute before tapping the first arrow. Another dives straight in and corrects course along the way. A third takes a Hint at the first sign of getting stuck, a fourth never does. In the end, all of them see “Level Complete!”. What is interesting is what happened before.

That is why, after every level you complete, Clear Arrows shows you not only stars and points, but also how you played. This page explains what lies behind this feedback, how it is meant and how it is not.

Two axes instead of a verdict

The play style feedback rests on two simple observations: how often did you tap wrong, that is, tap a blocked arrow? And how often did you use assists, that is, a Hint, a Solution move or a Magic Solve?

These two questions are less connected than you might think. You can play very precisely and still be happy to accept help. You can make many failed attempts and still never ask. Only together do they form a picture, and that picture is a style, not a ranking. There is no best position in this grid. There are only different ways of approaching a task.

Planning and trying: two sensible strategies

Problem-solving research has long distinguished between two basic approaches. In forward planning, you build an inner model of the task and run through it before acting; Allen Newell and Herbert Simon (1972) described this model as a problem space in which you search for a path to the goal. In trial and error, you act, observe what happens and learn from it. In everyday life, planning is often seen as the grown-up option and trying as the impatient one. From a research perspective, that is too simple.

Which strategy makes sense depends above all on what a mistake costs. When an error is cheap and quickly provides information, trying things out is efficient: you learn more from the mistake than you would have from long reflection. When an error is expensive, it pays to look more closely first. Good problem solvers stand out less for a fixed preference than for being able to switch between the two approaches, depending on what the situation demands. Dietrich Dörner (1989) describes the opposite case as a typical error: an approach is kept because it worked once, even though the situation has changed. Joachim Funke (2003) gives an overview of both approaches.

Why the game helps shape your style

In Clear Arrows, every tap on a blocked arrow costs a life. The clock runs from level 1, and from level 16 a wrong tap on a trap can cost several lives at once. The environment therefore rewards looking before tapping, and does so more strongly the further you get.

This matters for interpretation: a style is not only an expression of your personality, but also a response to the environment. If you try a lot in the first levels, you are acting sensibly, because the boards are small and mistakes are cheap. If you keep the same style in the late levels, you pay a higher price. If your feedback changes over the course of the game, that is not a contradiction. It shows that you are adapting.

The five styles in detail

Steady Hand. No misclick, no help. The strength lies in precision. The typical bottleneck is the clock: if you secure every move, you need time, and from level 11 it is precisely fast, unbroken sequences of moves that give time back.

Look Before You Tap. Looked first, then tapped, barely a detour. Very close to the Steady Hand, with the occasional failed attempt. The strength is a good sense of when looking closely pays off. The bottleneck shows when information is missing, for example in Hidden mode, where planning alone is not enough and you have to reveal cells to see anything at all.

Trial and Error. Plenty of attempts and never asked. The strength is independence and a strong willingness to learn from mistakes. The bottleneck is lives: when mistakes become more expensive, the supply is no longer enough for every exploration.

Safety Net. Rarely tapped wrong, and happy to accept a helping hand. The strength is caution: uncertainty is recognised and cushioned before it costs anything. The bottleneck is coins and lives, because no help is free: Solution move and Magic Solve cost coins, the Hint costs a life, and whatever you buy as stock in the Shop, you have paid for with coins beforehand.

Full Throttle. Full speed, every tool, whatever gets you through. The strength is determination and the ability not to be held back by setbacks. The bottleneck is that you rarely find out whether it could have been done differently.

What this feedback is not

A play style is not a personality test. It rests on a few numbers from a single run, and those numbers depend on many things that have little to do with you as a person: how tired you are, whether you play on your phone or on a computer, whether you already know the level, whether you are reading messages on the side. A sound interpretation therefore sticks to what was observed. It says: in this run, this is how you played. It does not say: this is who you are.

For this reason, the feedback also distinguishes between “This run” and “Your style lately”. It only names your recent style after several completed levels; the exact rule is in the next section. Only across several levels does a pattern emerge, and even that pattern describes your behaviour in a game, not your character.

What the two numbers measure, and what they do not

The feedback works with two shares. The first is the share of your taps that removed nothing: a blocked arrow, a blocked trap or, in the levels with coloured arrows, the wrong colour. A wrong tap into a trap cluster counts as one misclick, even if it costs several lives. If the share is above 12 percent, that is, if more than roughly every 8th tap misses, the run counts as one with many failed attempts.

The second share counts assists per removed arrow, and it weights them. A Hint counts 1, a Solution move 1.5, a Magic Solve 2: the more an assist does for you, the more it weighs. If there are more than 8 such points per 100 removed arrows, the run counts as one with a lot of help. The Steady Hand is a special case: not a single misclick and not a single assist, not even one Hint.

Both thresholds are set, not measured. They are reasoned estimates and have not yet been calibrated against data from real players. A run just below a threshold hardly differs from one just above it. The classification is a rough sort, not a measurement with decimal places.

Some things the numbers do not see at all: how long you thought and how often the clock ran out. A run in which time runs out twice can still count as Steady Hand. Using Continue with +1 life does not count either. Only completed levels are counted. A level you fail appears in no evaluation, even if it was the most revealing one.

For “Your style lately”, the game stores the last 50 completed runs on your device. The style is only shown from 5 stored runs, and a repeated level also counts as a run. What is named is the most frequent style among the last 10, and in a tie the one that occurred most recently. This is not an average: five runs with Safety Net followed by five with Steady Hand do not give something in between, but Steady Hand.

The real exercise: switching on purpose

It gets interesting when you read the feedback as an invitation. Play a level you already know once, deliberately slowly and without a single misclick. Play another one deliberately fast and take every bit of help you need. Notice what feels easier each time and what feels harder.

If you know your usual style and can try out another, you gain room to manoeuvre that goes far beyond a puzzle. The feedback after every level shows you where you currently stand.

How to deal with the moment when nothing works any more is described on the page Giving up is not a verdict on your character. Why Clear Arrows is so hard to put down is explained in One rule that hooks you.

References