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.
The sale is long since over but I still had a pile of these to try out. Also I tried the demo for Puzzle Compound but it's co-op only and I'm feeling too antisocial to get a friend to help, so I couldn't get anywhere. It looks nice, though.
- Agent A: A puzzle in disguise - Pretty sure this has been available for phones for ages. You're a spy on the trail of an enemy spy, but you've wandered into a trap and let her lock you in her secret hideout. (Along with all her documents, including a note which seems to give away the twist of the whole game. Neither you nor she are very good spies.) I really like the art style - environments are crisp 3D stylised to look like cartoon backdrops, and the 2D aminated characters are charming. The puzzles are very much on the easy end of the difficulty spectrum for escape room games. You can breeze through the demo (which I think is the first half of Chapter 1) in 20 minutes. That's a good design choice for a casual phone puzzler, but I think a couple of the puzzles are a little too trivial, so that you're not solving them so much as doing busywork - there were at least two "press the buttons in the right order by trial-and-error" sequences. I liked the puzzle with getting the key of the aquarium, though - that's similarly trivial, but it's an unusual trick and a fun little surprise.
- Alan's Automaton Workshop - It is the year 1938 and you program mechanisms for Alan Turing, who is breaking new ground in the fields of logic, computing, and sexy robots. A very likeable Zachlike based around visual programming, where you design flowcharts which branch based on conditions. I enjoy that this game takes a deeply silly idea and plays it mostly straight. (There are a couple of gags. I like the robot maid Grace introducing a floating-point error when she's asked to add 0.1 + 0.2.) The main demo puzzles are straightforward (with a couple of challenging optimisation problems), but an optional set of puzzles gives a glimpse of what's to come, and it looks like a lot of the full game will have you building and operating a Turing machine. The UI is a big pain point here - it takes up way too much room and crowds out the play area, which is going to be a problem in complicated levels. Reviews also complain about the plot being dumb, but I'm a seasoned Professor Layton fan. Do your worst, Turing!
- Bonfire Peaks - This one's been around for a while and has had good press already, but I'd not really paid attention to it. This is lovely, though. It's 3D Sokoban where you need to carry a box of things up a small mountain in each level to a bonfire at the top. The obvious comparison is Stephen's Sausage Roll, a 3D Sokoban which requires similar understanding of verticality and finessing of different movement states (among other similar tricks), but Bonfire Peaks is less brutal, and even lets you skip a level here and there. Gorgeous use of voxels and lighting, although when combined with a stiff camera they can make it a little hard to pick out key features in a puzzle. Puzzles are very good, by the way - at least three in the demo hit that sweet spot of "this is impossible, game is bugged - oh of course that's how you do it, it's so simple, I'm a fool". The demo is generous, giving you 28 non-trivial puzzles. Curious if there's a storyline in the full game, because the objective - "burn your possessions" - suggests that the protagonist is Going Through It Right Now.
- CHR$(143) - Oh man, what a ridiculous game (complimentary)! It's a retro-styled game based on Amstrad computers (with an option to make it look more like a Windows 95 puzzle game) which plays like Boulderdash, except it's also a physics-based puzzler with water and heat simulations, except it's also a programming game about planning and building logic gates and managing power. One level (which took me about an hour) makes you build a perpetual steam-powered generator in a level which simulates the water cycle. This is one of those games which is clearly a huge passion project, and full of love and charm, and worth playing just because there's nothing else like it. Try the demo, which is absurdly generous - it's 22 levels, of which I survived 20 before tapping out, and that took me 3 and a half hours. Having said all this, I'm not sure I would enjoy it for much longer than I played it. Some of the levels are extremely long multi-stage affairs with reflex-based tricks and no mid-level checkpoints where it's very easy to die and have to restart - it's a very retro game in all its sensibilities. I was never great at machine-building games anyway, and I think this one is several hundred cuts above what I'm capable of.
- Copy Editor: A RegEx Puzzle - Yup, that's what it is. Each puzzle gives you a piece of classic literature that's been botched in some way (e.g. the opening of A Tale of Two Cities, except in the present tense: "it is the best of times, it is the worst of times..."), and you need to type regex rules to transform the text to its correct form. It's aimed at beginners, I think, so you're taught the expressions you'll need gradually. However, I feel that the demo does not do this game any favours. For a start, it's too short - you only get the first five levels, all pretty simple, and you're only taught two expressions. The fourth and fifth level suggest there'll be a Zachlike bent to the whole game, making you think carefully about the order in which you do things, but you just don't get enough of that in the demo. Levels challenge you to optimise them to get three stars, but you're not taught the expressions you need, so you can't optimise them in the demo. (I checked: one of the hints (and by the way, the hints system is an in-game browser pointing you to a Medium page) tells you you'll need an expression that doesn't turn up in the demo.) It's a bad demo, is what I'm getting at. There are other problems but I'll stop here - it's a non-profit who made this game, apparently, and it's only a little game, and I don't mind the idea of an educational regex game, so there's no joy in going in on it. It just wasn't fun, though.
- Dungeon and Puzzles - It's those maze puzzles where you move until you hit a wall, except themed around a monster-killing dungeon crawler. I have to say these kinds of puzzles don't do much for me (not sure why!), so I didn't love this demo, but that's not the demo's fault. I think it does a good job of adding extra elements and wrinkles to the formula, such as weapons which must be used to kill monsters but which can also act as walls to stop your momentum (so that part of the puzzle could be "do I need to pick this up now or do I need to use it as a wall later on?"). All puzzles have a target number of moves for optimisation - I know a lot of players don't care for this kind of thing, but it seems to be optional. The pixel art is nice to look at, and the monsters are very cute. The fact that the game outright tells you "none of the monsters in this dungeon attack" paired with the objective to kill all monsters feels funny in a post-Undertale world.
- Rats in a Cage - This is an odd one. The framing story is that you've been directed to an AI job interview, so that the game is presented as taking place on an old CRT monitor, but the actual game has you controlling a rat salaryman in little mazes, toggling switches to open a path to the exit. The main hazard is your rat coworkers, who are looking for paths to the nearest cup of coffee or piece of office gossip, so the puzzles have you opening and closing paths to lure them out of position so they don't block the exit. It's a nice idea! There's not that many games with path-finding manipulation as a central puzzle mechanic (all I can think of off the top of my head is DROD's later levels with the brain monsters). Be warned that it's reflex-based, not turn-based, so timing is a factor. The puzzles are fine but the presentation really tires me out. The AI narrator hurls abuse at you in a way that was pretty old-hat during the Flash game era (if you ever played The World's Hardest Game back in the day, you already know what's up), although I'd hope the full game has a few more tricks up its sleeve, since the Steam capsule description says it "goes beyond the game window to stop you". The office satire interludes make Dilbert look subtle. I know job-hunting sucks (god do I ever know), but surely you wouldn't take any job this company offers you.
- Sokobond Express - It's Sokobond mashed up with Cosmic Express, two Draknek games I liked but never beat (I was well on the way with Cosmic Express last month but I've had to replace my phone so there goes my progress. This is the second time this has happened). Draw a track to have a molecule bond with other molecules on the way to the goal, creating a chemical compound about which you get a fun bit of trivia. I was wondering how the mashup would work, and it turns out to look a lot like SpaceChem - similar gameplay, similar hazards (don't let molecules collide, don't leave a molecule outside the play area at the end), but without the stress of managing an efficient production line on top of the puzzle. It's very slickly presented and the puzzles are enjoyable, if fiddly in the same way as Cosmic Express is - isn't it amazing how hard it is to find the exact line about such a tiny play area. The one nit I'd pick is that I instinctively think locking half the demo behind a request to wishlist the game is a little cheeky. Couldn't tell you why! It just feels cheeky.
- Viewfinder - Find or take photographs of the level, place them somewhere, and then enter them to access new parts of the level. This one was doing the rounds here a week or two ago, with everyone saying "go play this". I'm joining them. Go play this. I have no idea how it's been done, but it's phenomenal. It's a very open puzzle game: it looks like you can place the photographs anywhere, and completely chop and screw each level as you please. (You can even destroy the end goal of each level by taking a photo of the sky and placing it over the goal, though the game is kind enough to let you know when you've done that.) There's a sequence halfway through the demo that's absolutely stunning - if you've played it, you know the one. There seems to be a background story told though hints and allusions and audio logs, and there are a couple of issues there with clumsy dialogue and typos in subtitles, but it's all ignorable, and with a gameplay hook this cool, who cares about typos?