An indie roguelike that's available on Steam combining bullet hell with solving sudoku-like puzzles. Because apparently 'This is a mix of genres that makes zero sense' increases the likelihood I'm going to check something out.
The tl;dr - Solve relatively simple logic puzzles while dodging attacks from angry plants. If that sounds appealing, I think you'll have a good time with it.
The aim of Overhaul is to restore a power plant that has been inactive for long enough for it to have been overgrown with vegetation after your village has been without power for many years, before your sister gives birth and - likely - dies and/or loses the child in the process unless you succeed.
You do this by traversing a series of rooms to reach the power plant's core. Within the core is a 4x4 grid that you fill out cell each successful run, meaning to see closing credits you need to complete 16 runs, with each run unlocking new hazards to deal with and rooms correlating to them.
Within each room your objective is simple. Place the numbers 1-n into the n*n grid such that numbers do not repeat in a row or column, while some puzzles also have inequality signs between cells in the grid. If you're familiar with pencil puzzles, you might recognize these as Latin Squares and Futoshiki respectively. In each room, you have one or two 3x3 to 5x5 grids to solve, along with a variety of plants and other hazards to deal with.
Rooms are divided into four levels of difficulty, which gives you some control over how difficult your experience of a given run is, although rooms have at most three exits - some even having a single one - so you don't always have access to a room of the difficulty you were looking for. Sometimes the puzzles are harder in more difficult rooms, other times the quantity or challenge of hazards is ramped up, and some rooms do a bit of both.
Win or lose a run, it provides you with Watts to spend at the well at the start to unlock permanent upgrades, along with new items and abilities that you can acquire within the power plant. Meaning like with most modern roguelikes both you and the game is getting stronger as you progress.
Successful runs take me around 20-30 minutes, which is the sort of length I like from non-traditional roguelikes - Short enough to be able to get one or two in on a whim, while long enough to feel substantial.
While not strictly needed given the difficulty of the puzzles on offer in the game, something not present that I am used to from modern Sudoku software and occasionally found myself missing here is the ability to 'pencil mark' cells within the grid with a list of possibilities of what might be in the cell, although had this feature been present, I'm unsure if would have made the interface overly clunky for the number of times I found myself wanting to do it.
As a side note - I talk to myself when doing Sudoku and other number placement puzzles, no matter how simple the puzzle is. My dialogue to myself when I've noticed it while playing this game has been... Surreal. "OK, so... 2... 4... Banana... Laser..."