Steam is doing a sale of puzzle games. I downloaded a bunch of demos. They're good. In general.

• Akurra - I'm doing these in alphabetical order, but I have to say Akurra was by far my favourite of these. A textless puzzle Metroidvania in the style of Link's Awakening. The puzzles are great, and the secrets are better. Some really nice use of Sokoban elements, and really nice progression, both in terms of gradually unlocking more parts of the world and more abilities, and in terms of realising "oh, this visual symbol means x, so if I go back to this other place I saw it maybe I can...". It's an incredibly generous demo. I finished in 90 minutes with 83% completion, and I have no idea where most of that last 17% could be. (There are a few clearly suspicious things in the game world, but I think some of those might be stuff that only comes into play in the full game.) I cannot wait for this one to be finished.
• The Court of Wanderers - Step on pressure plates to rotate parts of the level around the plates. It's 3D and gravity applies, so if you rotate something over a pit, it falls in (which may or may not be good). Stylistically like a minimalist take on The Godkiller Chapter 1 (full disclosure, I worked on that game a little, it's good). The puzzles in the demo are good, with a couple of real stumpers towards the end. Very nice puzzles - I'd like to play more.
• Gordian Rooms: A curious heritage - From the same tradition of phone-friendly puzzle adventure games as The Room and The House of Da Vinci. Standard escape room puzzles - find codes, figure out patterns, etc. Not bad at all! I was dumb and needed a bunch of hints to get through, but I think everything was fair and possible to reason out if I had been more observant or if I hadn't over-complicated things. You have to be pretty thorough, though - you have to click and drag everything in case it's secretly interactable. Still, I liked this.
• Logic Keypad - Wide-open escape room focused on finding codes to open keypads. It's buggy and relies on AI for its English translation, and the cursor doesn't alway indicate when you can (and must) interact with something, but it's made by a solo Vietnamese dev as a first project so I don't hold that against it. The jokes are bad, though. If you've seen one "haha, this puzzle went nowhere and I wasted your time" bit, you've seen them all. The puzzles are fine as far as escape room code puzzles go, but I can't say I enjoyed playing this. (Also you can't save during the demo, and there's a couple of notes in the game saying the developer will add saving as $5 DLC. I'm pretty sure that's a joke. If it isn't, uh, good luck to the dev.)
• Lok - Ooh. I love this. It's a wordsearch, but finding certain words lets you black out squares in certain ways, and blacked-out squares are skipped over when finding words. So it's about highlighting words in the right order to chip away at the puzzles. Some of the levels get very fiendish with lots of red herrings. All sorts of little tricks to discover. Apparently this was a physical book before it was a game? I can't imagine the book is as fun to play (undoing mistakes you've made would be a pain), but I'll bet people who played the book are saying the same about the game.
• Patrick's Parabox - Yes, I'm late to this party. Yes, it's good. Steam says this is similar to Mini Metro. I don't think that's true.
• Puddle Knights - One of the most immediately charming game ideas I've ever seen. You need to move a dignitary (princess, bishop, etc) from one end of the level to the other, but they won't sully themselves by stepping in muddy puddles, so you also need to control knights so that their long capes create paths over the puddles. Immediately a very cute and funny idea! I wish the demo was longer, though. You only get eight puzzles, enough to give you a taste of how different puzzle elements might interact, but none of them are very challenging. Still, I want to try the full game so I guess the demo did its job.
• The Signal State - I think this is another one I'm late to - I remember a lot of buzz about a game based on assembling synthesizer racks, and I think it might be this one. It turns out the racks actually represent electronic components, and you're a guy in a post-apocalyptic future trying to repair electrical equipment to get a farm up and running. In practice, it's a maths puzzle Zachtronics-like in heavy disguise: you get an input signal (i.e. a graph of a sequence of numbers), the components act as simple maths operations and logic gates, and you need to transform your input into a given output signal. I'm not as high on Zachlikes as I once was, but I enjoyed the demo a lot, and I love the theming. I might even go back and attempt the extra-hard post-demo puzzle.
• The Temple of Snek - It's Snake crossed with a dungeon crawler (or perhaps DROD): you're a snake guarding a Mesopotamian temple against invaders by eating them. There is a lot to like here. I love how the temple is interconnected, and I love the rhythm to which the game is set. But I found the gameplay irritating. The game begs to be slowed down so you can actually think about what you want to do before you slither into a wall, and the developer does give you the option to move manually rather than automatically, but doing that spoils the rhythm and makes it harder to tell what the enemies are doing (a few enemies have puzzle-specific AI and their movement pattern isn't necessarily predictable). The default automatic movement is too slow, and the speed-up button, for some reason, takes a second of wind-up to kick in and mutes the music, meaning it doesn't feel much faster and you might miss out on the lovely musical transitions from room to room. The camera is not always helpfully positioned, which is very annoying when bonking into a wall makes you restart the puzzle. I don't know. The idea is a lot of fun, it's clear the developers cared deeply, and I want to love this game, but playing it just winds me up.