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Hikari is a puzzle-arcade mindbending logic game in which the player attempts to attain an objective by clicking the right pieces - in many cases, lightbulbs - on the board. Lightbulbs are sensitive to their neighbors' light; if lightbulb A shines on lightbulb B, lightbulb B will toggle between off and on.

GamesResearch has just released Hikari 1.1 to correct several minor bugs plaguing Hikari 1.0.

FOR PLAYERS WHO DON'T ALREADY HAVE A VERSION OF HIKARI INSTALLED: Just download and install the Hikari 1.1 installation package.

FOR PLAYERS WHO ALREADY HAVE HIKARI 1.0 INSTALLED: Installing the quick patch to 1.1 is easy. After downloading and unzipping the patch file, replace the Hikari executable currently installed on your system (by default at location C:\Program Files\GamesResearch\Hikari.exe) with the executable in the patch, also called Hikari.exe. Once you have replaced Hikari.exe, the bugs have been fixed and you're ready to roll. This patch applies both to registered versions of Hikari as well as demo versions.

Hikari System Requirements:

• Windows 98 or better running on a Pentium or better
• Minimum 800 x 600 screen size
• 64MB available RAM
• 36MB disk space
• DirectX 8.1 or later (available from Microsoft's website : http://www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/default.aspx

Release 1.1 features added and bugs fixed:

• Board intro and exit text no longer spontaneously disappears
• Some computers that could not play the game because of sound card difficulties will now be able to play without sound
• Board list text display issues fixed
• Board level routing errors fixed

Release 1.0 features added:

• Added about 40 new boards
• Added four new piece types
• Further board balancing

Revision 0.99 final beta features added:

• Added two new types of bombs
• Added explosion and battery special effects
• Integrated sound tracks
• Completed game shell
• Updated user interface
• Changed sound effects
• Reduced load time significantly
• Profiled, optimized (for another ten-fold improvement)
• Fixed memory leaks
• Added about one hundred new boards
• Balanced boards

Revision 0.92 beta features added:

• Checkerboard playspace background (we think this is a big improvement, both aesthetically and from a gameplay perspective)
• Dynamic lighting
• Optimization - this version runs about ten times faster, on average, than the previous version
• New tokens, including Limited Turnstiles, Activator Turnstiles, Swappers, and Blue Eyeballs
• New boards

In addition, we've temporarily suspended the soundtrack. It will be back in future versions! Please let us know what you think of the new build.

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When you first load up Hikari, you will be presented with the Hikari Main Menu:

When you click "Play Hikari", you will be presented with the "board selection screen":

Choose one of the boards with the mouse to play. Some boards are not yet available; you must earn enough points in order to be able to open them. These boards are the grayed-out boards. Once you have selected a board, you will be sent to the play screen:

In this case, we have chosen to play the board "Two Clicks Will Suffice".

For all boards, it is very important to pay attention to what the objective says. You can only defeat the board if this objective is completed. In this case, the objective tells us to turn on all the lights.

In many cases, the title of the board will provide us a clue as how to solve the board. In this case, "Two Clicks Will Suffice" tells us just that - we can solve this board with a mere two clicks.

When we hover over the piece with the mouse, every piece that will be affected by clicking the mouse will be highlighted. For this piece, the 25-watt lightbulb effects a change across a cross-shaped neighborhood (other lightbulbs have different neighborhoods). If we click the mouse, all the lightbulbs that are highlighted - which are now off - will toggle to on.

If we move the cursor three lightbulbs to the right and one up:

We can expect that, when we click the mouse again, all the lightbulbs will be turned on, and we will have fulfilled our objective:

Now what would have happened, if instead of clicking on these two lightbulbs, we had clicked on a different lightbulb? Here is an example.

Here, we have highlighted the lightbulb one to the right of the first lightbulb we highlighted in the previous example. Note that some of the lightbulbs highlighted are on, and some are off.

When we click the mouse, all lightbulbs that were off change to on, and all that were ON change back to OFF.

If at any time you become stuck on a board, you can click the "start over" button at the bottom of the screen. This resets all pieces to their original configuration. If you get bored of a board and want to try something else, click "board menu" in the bottom left-hand side of the screen to get back to the board menu.

Once we have beaten a level, we have the following options:

• Play the level again - if we can solve the board with a fewer number of clicks, we may be able to score additional points.
• Play the previous level
• Play the next level
• Game Menu - this is the board selection screen. You can choose from all available levels from this screen.

Now, there is more just one lightbulb type in the game. Here is an example of a different lightbulb, the stronger "60-watt lightbulb".

As you can see, the influence that this lightbulb has on its neighbors - "its neighborhood" - is larger than that of the 25-watt lightbulb. There are an additional four lightbulbs affected - the corners. Once we click the mouse, we can expect that the 3 x 3 square of lightbulbs highlighted will switch to on:

Getting used to - and taking advantage of - the different lightbulb types and their neighborhoods is critical in order to solve puzzles; particularly so for puzzles that employ both lightbulb types (and lightbulb types not yet mentioned).

In addition to lightbulbs and additional types of lights, there are entirely different types of pieces that can help you - or hurt you - to solve puzzles. One of the most important types of these pieces is the Turnstile:

Near the lower left-hand corner, the cursor is perched above a counter-clockwise blue turnstile (direction indicated by arrows). No pieces are highlighted because clicking the turnstile does not turn lightbulbs on or off. When we click the turnstile:

The four pieces to the north, south, east and west of the turnstile rotate counterclockwise and finally settle into position:

Turnstiles can be both clockwise and counterclockise. In addition, there are different colors of turnstiles that rotate different neighborhoods of pieces. It should also be noted that, if there is at least one spot normally in range for a turnstile that is not occupied by a piece, it is impossible to induce the turnstile to rotate.

Another class of piece that deserves special attention are pieces that cannot be activated directly, but who have an impact on the playspace if they are activated by neighboring lights. Once such example is a bomb.

Here we have a red bomb surrounded by a bunch of 25-watt lightbulbs. Now, let's hover the cursor over the lightbulb directly beneath the bomb:

We can see that the bomb is in the lightbulb's neighborhood. What happens when we click the bulb?

The bomb explodes.

All pieces around the bomb are destroyed. If your objective is to turn on all of the lights, then this means that you are out of luck, and you have to start the board over again. On the other hand, if the board's objective is to destroy everything, bombs come in very useful.

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One important thing to remember is that, in order to minimize clicks on a board, clicking the same lightbulbs twice or more is often wasting clicks, and wasting an opportunity to score bonus points for a board. Of course, this does not apply so much to boards with turnstiles, and definitely not to tri-state piece types like traffic lights and other such pieces. But keeping this point firmly in mind will help you to minimize the number of moves you make per board.

If a board appears symmetrical, try to capitalize on this symmetry by clicking both sides in succession to try to arrive at a solution. This will not always work, but in many cases it will prove fruitful.

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On some systems, we've been experiencing some graphical rendering issues... the textures are stretched a bit too far - e.g. one pixel too far - and makes the animations look blurry or clamped. We think we have solved this problem, but if you run across rendering issues, please let us know via the contact page.

In addition, on a few systems we just can't get the thing to run. If you have this problem, please send us the log file gameeventlog.html, located in the hikari directory. This will help us to solve the problem.

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We welcome any comments, criticism, board ideas, piece ideas, and anything else. Please tell us what you think of Hikari by visiting the contact page.