Paquerette is an odd one as I played the original demo probably a couple years ago now, thought it was neat but that said demo likely covered most of the mechanical ground they could cover, and didn’t think about it again. Within the past month or so I noticed several puzzle-focused people having it at or near their game of the year and got very confused, but apparently they legit fleshed it out into something that goes well beyond what one would think based on a cursory examination. Apparently it goes a bit Toki Tori 2+ eventually which does intrigue me, they apparently gave it a more fleshed out demo that gives a better indication what it is currently like so I may jump into it some time this week.
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I’ve watched people play parts of it on youtube bc I suspected it does things that would be “too much” for me and I have confirmed, yes, it does things that are “too much” for me.
There’s a certain level of tedium a puzzle game hits where I’m like well if I’m going through all this trouble then I might as well just play Tactical Nexus and really lean into the brain burn.
Someone mentioned a puzzlescript game named Vertebrae to me recently and out of curiosity/boredom I gave it a shot and what an absolutely vicious yet simple looking puzzle game this appears to be. I assume getting stuck for a bit on level 2 out of 50 is a bad sign, I eventually got through the first 8 levels (was stuck on the 7th for an hour or so) and am unsure how much more time I’ll put into it but it felt like something worth passing along.
To give a quick summary it is a sokoban where you play as a little mouse who crawls inside a dead snake skull and must push rocks onto switches to open the way off the current screen/puzzle. What makes it so tricky is that you eventually get some vertebrae attached to said skull that trail behind you; this both means that you have to manage the trailing bits to push things (if you move forward or turn the vertebrae follow you, if you back up they stay in their current orientation) and that you can use the environment to snap parts of said spine off in order to use them as temporary blocks themselves or to adjust your size to be more maneuverable through tight spaces so that you don’t get stuck or accidentally bump into/move certain rocks. Don’t worry, they snap right back on.
Like I said the difficulty level is, umm… basically set to max right at the start, I literally cannot even imagine what late game levels will look like. I’m not sure how many people in existence would know…
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Holy cow I barely got by level 1 ^ D^
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Yeah it is just instantly a lot! The second level is basically 4 different sections that act as tutorials and even that can’t help but force you to really think things through.
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ah yeah this one is like infamously hard. i think i got about as far as you and would be interested if you manage any more. didn’t seem like it was for me but i appreciate it exists.
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FWIW I’m currently up to level 13 but had to look up a hint for level 11, and I notoriously hate looking up hints. That level required what I’d generally consider a late game level of figuring out how to get something impossible-seeming to be done. I think I’m gonna drop it soon as I am starting to find it exhausting in the it is literally fatiguing my brain to work this hard kind of way, but it is definitely well designed in an absurd kind of way.
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Gonna drop a mention for 20 Small Mazes which came out a day or so back. It is exactly what it sounds like, but they all have different gimmicks so it really is a bunch of smallish logic puzzles you have to pick away at for a bit more than an hour (I played for an hour and have 18 of them finished). It’s cute and free, nice if one is looking for a short pleasant thing.
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I started up Taiji and it is pretty good so far, but it is almost impossible to not describe it as “but we have The Witness at home”. TBF it has been completely silent so it lacks certain pretensions said game had but it is basically a few steps away from being an outright fangame.
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Jon Blow did some play testing & feedback for it, so the similarities are abundant. the non-homage parts are excellent, the derivative parts “just fine” “how fast can I get through this”
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I picked this up at a discount, and I’m impressed. Games of this type are kind of stressful for me to play because it feels like a countdown to the the inevitable point where I get hopelessly stuck and it’s more frustrating than fun. Sometimes I reach this point very early in a game.
Jelly Is Sticky, I’m happy to report, does a good job of easing you into the puzzle elements while at the same time never feeling like any of the puzzles are repetitive filler.
The textures and substances look great, and the physics (more tied to the visuals than the mechanics) adds a lot of appeal.
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This is good to hear, I picked up a copy some time back but I keep getting distracted by something each time I think I need to finally get around to it.
Can of Wormholes
Playing through this puzzle game that got very positive reviews from puzzle-heads last year…
You are a tin can stranded on a spaceship. You can control space worms to act as your legs (or maybe they are controlling you?). You can spit out “worm”-holes from your can onto pads which let you play the spaceship’s puzzles. The spaceship is a worm as well.
The game is very much in the mold of these “thinky” puzzle games - there is a fundamental gameplay mechanic and every single puzzle is designed to “teach” you something about that gameplay mechanic. Like games such as Stephen’s Sausage Roll (it’s main influence as far as I can tell), the fundamental gameplay mechanic is deeper than it initially lets on.
The main mechanic here is the worm movement. The worms move like the classic “snake” game + you can “reverse” the worm along the same path it prior took forward (up to where the tail was when you start reversing).
The game has a huge number of “deeper” mechanics built off the movement system. The discoveries never end, nearly every puzzle is revealing something new. At least, I assume that’s the case - I’m only at 40% completion according to my save file.
While I deeply, deeply respect the creator for his ingenuity, this game is exhausting.
One of the issues I had with “Baba is You” (which sort of exists in the same space as these games) was how exhausting it got in the second half of the game. There was a point where the wonder of the gameplay mechanics (“wow! i can turn everything into baba!”) gave way to a wall of exhaustion (“oh god, what word do i need to put on top of another word, and where, to finish first of 3 parts of this puzzle, that will teach me yet another new mechanic i need to internalize for the remainder of the game”). Each puzzle is a Mount Everest, where conquering one reveals a slightly taller Everest you have to climb next.
It’s the same here. On one hand, it is cool to keep discovering new mechanics built off of just moving a worm. On the other hand, at a certain point I wish these games built in some breathers - puzzles that aren’t about teaching new mechanics, easier puzzles that let you practice a prior mechanic in a straightforward manner, more focused puzzles where the # of movement variables isn’t daunting, and puzzles that are just a funny gag.
Credit where credit is due: the game has a built in hint system. Every single puzzle has a “gain insight” button where (if you click it) you are sent to a smaller, modified version of the puzzle board that is very focused on just teaching the puzzle’s lesson. It’s impressive the creator essentially made double the # of puzzles. You can argue he did exactly what I asked for above. However, (A) I was often resistant to do these mini-puzzles as they occasionally totally spoiled the actual puzzle without any critical thinking, defeating the entire purpose of the game and (B) I felt the better mini-puzzles I’ve encountered should have just been actual puzzles.
Maybe I’m just losing my taste for games like this. As I wrote, the game is very impressive from a puzzle-standpoint. Some of the discovery moments (not all) are quite cool. Though it’s yet to hit the highs of something like Stephen’s Sausage Roll or Baba, there was viscerality to those games that’s missing here). It just feels (to me) a bit too clinical, too IQ-test.
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Been playing through The Machine’s Garden recently, one of those “find a path that steps on every tile once” kinda puzzle games.
Having it take place on a hexagonal grid does give it a different feel, as does having tiles with certain abilities like arrows that send you to the nearest target one it is pointed at or purple ones that create a clone at every other purple tile when stepped on. It’s also very simple looking but has enough effects on it to keep it from seeming too dull. There is no traditional undo but clicking on any part of your prior path while unwind everything back to that point which is both useful and neat looking.
Each time you solve a puzzle you get a bit of story about a supercomputer that has woken up many years after a likely nuclear war, dealing with what happened, the people left behind, is it good to blow people up and that sort of thing. It is brief and fine enough to function as a momentary cooldown between levels and a reason to push ahead and see what happens next.
What trips me up is most of the few reviews it has points out its brief length and being neither too easy nor hard and… man once I hit the end run of the final five levels it sure seemed very hard to me. Above is an image from the third to last stage from the store page and while several are covered up it is a mass of arrows and targets spread across several islands with orange tiles which once you step on them you have a point that sticks to you and restricts which ways you can roll. Add in the purple clones (which means having to keep track of multiple routes once they are activated, either you can all move in the same direction or none of you can) and I just have difficulty narrowing down the multitude of options and potential eventual restrictions into anything resembling a usable gameplan. Seemingly most other players did not, so it is interesting if somewhat discouraging to be shown a way in which my mind works a bit below average.
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am not sure exactly where to put pen-n-paper word puzzles (like Lok) but,
it’s teaching me about garden paths. am about half-way through (so, 25% done)
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youngest didn’t like that we didn’t have time to go through the word searches before bed, so made
b3 m9 n7 s3 u7
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The Thinky Games folks got a puzzle/“thinky” game database up and running on their website now, it is far from complete (definite recency bias as they built atop what they had already covered when starting) but if one wanted a place to start looking for well regarded puzzlers (and got done with this topic already >_>) or recent releases it handles that well enough.
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Played through Sensorium this past week, it is a low budget entry in the The Witness subgenre of puzzle games but a fairly solid one. It is primarily built around five areas each built around one of the five senses, some being more sensical than others (TBF I have no clue how you’d try to model smell in a puzzle game).
A lot if it comes down to figuring out the rules to get lines to light up in such a way as to light up the final point in the tangle of things, although there are digressions to occasional bits of block pushing and the like. Final area mixes the various bits together, it’s fairly by the book but solidly executed, lacking the pretentiousness of its inspiration and done in a bit over 4 hours.
Infinifactory
…It is literally the moment I write this that I realize saving any of the gifs I exported from the game while playing would been useful for this; one sec.
There we go, much nicer.
Infinifactory is the second-ish Zachtronics programming-type game (TIS-100 came out during its early access period which makes it a bit muddy), abandoning their traditional 2d set-up for a more 3d assembly line approach. You are given a set of inputs and what the final result needs to be and good amount of space, beyond that you have freedom to use the tools you have however you see fit. Unlike Spacechem the space you are given is rather generous, so while you eventually bump yourself against a wall things are much less limited in that regard.
Of the Zach games I’ve played this is probably the most mechanically solid one to deal with (have no played Opus Magnum). Being in 3d means you have to move around the assembly lines as you construct and run them, as gravity/elevation is important you will often have things dropping down or flying up around you, and seeing everything come together feels more viscerally satisfying because of it. It has quirks, there are some things that feel like they should be relatively simple to accomplish and yet there are gaps in the tools given to you that make them virtually impossible, but even my knowing no advanced techniques self generally was always capable of breaking things down into mental pieces that weren’t too absurd to craft.
The issue is that the campaign design is also the worst of the three Zachs I played. Part of this is likely due to its extended (for them) early access stay, but even before that it was… troubled. The first half of the game (what was there at early access launch) is stronger but also incredibly scattershot. Ideas and mechanics are introduced and dropped in short order (there is a machine you can feed blocks into to shave them into given shapes that had a lot of potential; it is used two or so times in a row and never reappears), the general difficulty curve is fine at this point but there is a definite lack of focus.
The back half was added in three chunks over the early access run and… if they were stand alone bonus content it would probably work better, but as part of the now extended main campaign/story it just muddies things up. You get three missions of several puzzles each that each give you a new block to play with and are built around a new central mechanical twist; none of said twists exist outside of their own mission and don’t make you any better at the main game part but at dealing with said mechanic/twist. The first is the worst, three or four tutorial puzzles to get you ready for three or so actual puzzles around an IMO poor mechanic removed from everything else with a new block that just duplicates something you likely already had to jerry-rig. The second is better but the new block it gives you is basically nerfed out shortly later, the third introduces a sorting option that is great and would have benefitted everything if introduced at least a third of the game earlier.
You then unlock the last/10th mission/set of puzzles, and while it feels like an appropriate level of escalation/difficulty compared to what the 6th mission/set asked of you… 7/8/9 were off doing their own thing rather than get you ready for that. Huge jump in difficulty/complexity, I’m talking the very longest of puzzles before took maybe an hour while these mostly took about 3 or so hours to crack.
So I am left torn. If one likes this type of game I can’t help but recommend it, again the central building/tools/mechanics in play are really good. The first half while unfocused it still good enough, there’s a better theoretical version but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good and such. If it stopped at the 12 hour point I spend this whole write-up talking about how great it was even with some of its warts. It is a 40 hour long game though (back half takes much longer) and… well over 98% of people who played the game didn’t bother seeing it through to the end and those numbers are appropriate.
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the long-delayed parts 2 & 3 Lost Memories DLC for Bonfire Peaks has hit the stores. am having a great time swinging wildly between “Corey this is too easy” “augh why are you like this” “ha ha, you’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to get one over me, the great dingus”
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