Comparison

Kestli vs MindForge

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Kestli

Engage your mind with a logic puzzle game where you unblock and arrange falling stones. Solve beautifully crafted puzzles to relax and experience a deeply satisfying challenge. Daily puzzles and hints are available to enhance your gameplay.

Highlights
  • Unblock and arrange falling stones
  • Hand-crafted puzzles
  • Daily puzzles
  • No internet required for gameplay
  • Hint system available
Features
Read full description

Unblock and arrange the falling stones in this novel and innovative game of logic. The beautiful hand-crafted puzzles will relax you mind. Slide the blocks in the correct order to fit them into the target area. But watch out: Once the stones have fallen down, they cannot be moved upwards again. Finding the solution — when the last stone snaps into place — is a deeply satisfying experience. The name “Kestli” (pronounced KEST-lee) means “small boxes” in some German dialects and also sounds similar to the name of this game’s inventor, Johannes Kestler. Features: • Puzzle packs with various sizes and difficulty levels • Daily puzzles for your daily extra dose of joy • No internet connection required (except for downloading new puzzles) • Hints available if you are really stuck

About

MindForge

Features
Read full description

MindForge is a small collection of brain-training games that runs entirely on your phone. Two of the four are the app's own — built on things this app had to solve anyway, and not found elsewhere. FOUR GAMES Digit Bridge. The same number, written in two different numbering systems. One side shows it in the digits you read; the other shows it in the digits you don't. Find the match among six candidates, where the wrong ones are near-misses: a transposition, a substituted digit, a reordering. It exists because this app already had to render Latin and Eastern Arabic numerals side by side, and it turns that into the question. False Light. One imaginary light falls on the whole board. Most tiles stand raised under it; a few are pressed flat. Sweep the pressed ones before the field resets. There is no text and no colour on this board at all — depth is the only channel — so it plays identically for everyone, and identically in every language. Stroop Rush. The word "BLUE" is printed in red ink. Tap the colour, not the word. Your reading reflex fires first and you have to override it, and that override is the whole exercise. A streak multiplier rewards holding your nerve. Schulte Grid. The numbers 1 to 25, scattered across a five-by-five board. Tap them in order, as fast as you can. Fix your gaze on the centre tile and hunt with your peripheral vision. Each runs at three difficulties, and each difficulty keeps its own personal best, so a Blitz record never overwrites the Chill run you were proud of. NO NETWORK CODE AT ALL Not "we don't sell your data". There is nothing in this app that can reach the internet: no HTTP client, no socket, no remote config, no fonts fetched at runtime. Nothing can be sent because there is nothing to send it with. So there is no account, no sign-up, no ads, no in-app purchases, no analytics and no crash reporting. Your scores live in one database file on your device. MindForge is open source under the Apache License 2.0, which means that claim is checkable by reading the code rather than something you have to take on trust. PLAYABLE WITHOUT COLOUR VISION In a game whose entire mechanic is naming colours, colour-blind support is a correctness requirement rather than a preference. Every Stroop answer key carries a fill pattern as well as a colour — solid, diagonal stripes, dots, concentric rings — and the stimulus word repeats its own pattern in ink. You can play the whole game by matching patterns and never discriminate a colour at all. The patterns are always on. There is no setting to find. False Light goes further: it carries no colour information whatsoever. Settings also offers a colour-blind-friendly palette, which changes the colours a round is generated from, not merely how they are painted. FOUR LANGUAGES, TWO RIGHT-TO-LEFT English, German, Persian and Kurdish Sorani. Right-to-left is not a mirrored stylesheet applied at the end. Every inset, alignment and text direction is written directionally, so the layout is correct by construction. Persian and Kurdish also render Eastern Arabic numerals, which matters more here than in most apps: in Schulte Grid the numerals are the game, and in Digit Bridge the two systems are the question. ALSO IN THE BOX A Daily Mix that picks your session so you can start training without deciding anything first. A streak that counts the days you showed up. Stats holding your personal bests, games played, total time trained and a chart of recent runs. VoiceOver labels throughout, Dynamic Type support, and a reduce-motion setting that collapses animation to zero rather than merely shortening it. A NOTE ON WHAT THIS IS MindForge is a game. It is not a medical device, a diagnostic tool or a treatment. It makes no claim that playing it will improve your memory, attention, intelligence or academic performance, or that it will prevent or delay cognitive decline. Your score measures how you did in this app, and nothing further.

Screenshots

Kestli4 screens
MindForge4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is in-app purchases: MindForge at none against Kestli's 3. MindForge also leads on ads (none vs shown). On price, device support and iOS requirement there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Kestli sells 3 one-off in-app purchases. MindForge asks for nothing beyond the download.

Scorecard2 real differences · 7 level
Kestli versus MindForge: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterKestliMindForge
PriceFreeFree
Rating4.5 (2 ratings) — better—
Number of ratings2 — better—
Update frequencyEvery 9 days—
AdsYesNo — better
In-app purchasesYesNo — better
MonetizationFree with in-app purchases—
DevicesiPhone, iPad, iPodiPhone, iPad, iPod
Requires iOS13.013.0
Further details — not scored
Size28 MB19 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperJohannes KestlerZakaria Fatahi

In-app purchases

3 purchases

Kestli

One-time3
  • 5 hints$0.99
  • 20 hints$1.99
  • 70 hints$4.99
None

MindForge

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Kestli free?
Kestli is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is MindForge free?
MindForge is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do Kestli or MindForge have ads?
Kestli shows ads; MindForge does not.

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