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Feature: Install
Oh my, reviewing Globesweeper has proven to be one of the best things I've done of late. Because the tips in the comments for other puzzle games to try are making me such a ridiculously happy boy. After the really brilliant Tametsi, I've been playing last year's Delete, from LineWay creators Pony.
Feature: Hexcellent
After reviewing the pleasing puzzler Globesweeper, I was recommended a whole other pile of recent puzzle games I've missed. I'm working my way through them, and the first to report back on is 2017's Tametsi. A game that takes its lead from the best PC puzzle game of all, Hexcells, and then combines it with the core Minesweeper mechanic. Which is to say, bespoke, intricately…
Feature: BLOW UP THE MOON
Minesweeper is a terrible puzzle game. It's not a terrible game! But it's a terrible puzzle game. Because Minesweeper involves guessing, and that's fundamentally bad puzzle design. Whether you enjoy playing it comes down to how you approach it. If you're someone who enjoys methodically solving complicated puzzles using learned techniques (hello!) then Minesweeper is the worst. If you're someone who loves reaching a certain…
Feature: Well Appointed
The Room, as I once very wisely said, is the game Myst should have been. Astoundingly pretty graphics, impossible mechanisms and peculiar levers, switches and buttons, and so very many puzzles to solve, all set within a story so mysterious as to be close to impossible to fathom. Except in The Room's series of games there's a coherence, a delicacy of touch, and a far…
Feature: "I'm in"
It’s pretty obvious that the excellent Exapunks is a game about hacking. Specifically, it’s a game about programming viruses and sending them into networked systems to monkey around with data, set in a great alternative 90s Wired cyberworld of PC cases flashed with black and red decals and zines set in Apple Garamond. For its makers, though, Exapunks is a game about limitations. Its format…
Feature: Head held high
We've been writing about crazy-bonkers puzzler GNOG in its various forms since 2014. Originally called GNAH!, Graham immediately loved the look of it. Then a year later developers KO_OP Mode declared that they were scrapping everything and starting over, renaming the game GNOG. Since then we've been patiently waiting, seeing the game come out on iOS, then PS4, and finally now it's out on PC.…
Kine is one of those titles that annoys me the moment I hear about it, because I deserve to be playing it right now but some team of artists is working really hard on it so they won't just give it to me. Give it to me, you crazy kids. I have been a good boy all year and I am delighted by what you…
Feature: The cherry on top
Chuchel is a tour de force of animation, every scene so vibrant and hilarious, colourful and manic, the slightest tweaks in character facial expressions eliciting guffaws. Every new scene is a glorious delight just to look at, before you even start playing with it. And then, as you click on every element on the screen, delightful, silly and gorgeous things happen. This is a game…
Feature: Please send help
Puzzlement is a very minimalist puzzle game that packs quite a lot of clever into its little space. You play a very Pac-Man-esque 2D ghost, who wanders around inside/outside a 3D space collecting red blobs. This element of a 2D creature falling around within a 3D environment is completely bemusing, to the point where playing it for a little while is making just typing these…
Feature: Land of Tiles
This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Gorogoa [official site]. Gorogoa is a game about fitting things together. Fitting a detail in one image with a detail in another and see how it produces something new. And in making it, developer Jason Roberts found that making…
Feature: Morepix
Pictopix just doubled in size, and remains the best picross game on PC
The best picross/nonogram puzzle game on PC, Pictopix, just got a free update on its first anniversary. It's added in another 45 large-size puzzles, pretty much doubling the play-time of the whole game. So I've gone back in, and argue once more why this is the sort of PC game our industry is sadly failing to celebrate.
Feature: Through the square window
Gorogoa feels like a sort of magic that might fall apart in the understanding. It's a beautiful story in which you solve puzzles more by instinct than deduction, and their solutions feel as magical as the process. Its impossibly overlapping world weaves a delicate fiction that stretches beyond the boundaries of its central conceit.
Feature: GEOMETRIC!
Engare is a beautiful puzzle game of Islamic art and spirographs
In an attempt to teleport some geometric Islamic art from one location to another, developer Mahdi Bahrami failed to notice a spirograph had flown into the telepod. That's my theory anyway. The result is a very beautiful, very relaxing puzzle game called Engare.
Feature: Difficult Spell
The process from phone to PC is often a troubled one. But how does a long-time mobile favourite fare with its transition to Alphabear: Hardcover Edition [official site]? Here's wot I think:
Feature: Sackcloth
Hyperbolic responses to you successfully completing a challenge are a perennial issue in puzzle games. When it comes to no-frills mobile puzzling, and for no sensible reason it throws up the word "OUTSTANDING!" at you no matter how tricky the conundrum, it's pleasantly silly. But when a game tries to add an element of narrative to the situation, where characters fall over themselves to bestow…
Feature: Mind control
We seem to be in something of a blessed time for puzzle games. Alongside the big names are an ever-growing pile of previously unknown indies creating really inspired ideas, and right near the top of that pile is Semispheres [official site]. A single-player split-screen mind-fuck that's at once deeply relaxing and brain-rippingly smart.
Feature: Clone Something Good
You don't actually need an original gimmick, developers. You can just take an old gimmick and do it really well. That's BOOR's [official site] approach, a 2D platform puzzle game in which your character can create very temporary clones of herself and work in cooperation with them. We've seen it lots of times before, but when a good idea is done nicely, it's - well…
Feature: Direct line to my heart
After nearly twenty years in this job, it still doesn't get any less exciting to find a lovely new game. Linelight [official site] from My Dog Zorro is one such thing, a clean, beautifully presented puzzle game. Here's wot I think:
Feature: Not really pushing my buttons
I might start a service where I go door to door to puzzle game developers and just calmly reassure them they don't need an excuse. "It's fine. No one's judging you for making a puzzle game! We love them. You don't need to hide it. You don't need to disguise it. You don't need a story." My gentle, mellifluous tone will steady their nerves, help…
Feature: Pixel perfect
The PC is oddly bereft of decent Picross/Nonogram puzzles. Could Pictopix [official site] finally be the version that lets us put down our 3DS? Here's wot I think:
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