Welcome to Puzzle Lovers! - Play Hard. Think Harder.

Welcome once again to our weekly newsletter with puzzle game news, new and upcoming releases, giveaways, deals and bundles, spotlight on a lesser-known or forgotten game, and other stuff.

Greetings to those who’ve joined since last week! If you found us through a link to the newsletter, read the group overview to see what else we can offer, visit the forum for puzzle discussion, follow our curator for reviews and recommendations, check out our Basic Functionality and Accessibility Guide on how to improve your games, and tell your friends if you like what you see. Thanks!

Ideally, every group member would follow our curator and vice versa, but until then, here's the changelog. And don't forget our many lists based on themes and subgenres.

• Akuro & Bahaku 2 : The Ultimate Treasure (casual, adventure)
  
• Chiseler (logic)
  
• Chronoquartz (exploration, pixel graphics)
  
• CiniCross (logic, roguelike)
  
• Jixo 4: Magical Nights CE (hidden object)
  
• TRACE Definitive Edition (point&click, escape room)

• Bento Blocks (cozy, logic)
  
• Big Adventure: Trip to Europe 10 - CE (hidden object)
  
• Seven Seas Jewels CE (casual, match 3)
  
• Snapshots (casual, point&click)

• 方块 Block (puzzle platformer): A puzzle platformer with very basic graphics, but interesting mechanics.
  
• Cat Minesweeper (minesweeper, logic): A basic minesweeper, but with a companion cat offering helpful tips.
  
• Droid Must Deliver (sokoban): Basic Sokoban, vanilla mechanics, and levels that are more about execution than figuring out clever tricks.
  
• EXE.CUTOR (arcade, block puzzle): An arcade game in which you must place blocks in the grid to clear lines/rows, but with extra mechanics like rotating portions of the grid, deckbuilding, power upgrades…
  
• Papercut Art Gallery-Nature II (jigsaw, art): A cozy paper jigsaw puzzle, assemble pictures out of colorful paper pieces.
  
• SQUAREG (pattern matching): Shift rows and columns until you match the target pattern.
  
• Timeless Trials (action RPG, dungeon crawler, puzzle): A dungeon crawler in which you can re-arrange the dungeon.

• 😐 3D Escape Room: Cursed Legacy (large escape room, hidden object, mystical, first-person): A tap-and-drag escape room clearly inspired by The Room series. Find hidden compartments, solve small mini-puzzles, use the eyepiece to observe a hidden world, and the timepiece to teleport between different time periods. It’s not as good as The Room games, and I spent most of my time hunting for yet another compartment that was only visible from a very specific angle. The actual puzzle-solving was trivial. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Battle-Lines (tantrix, strategy, pvp): A more elaborate take on Tantrix with Go-like mechanics. You place tiles with colored lines, trying to form the longest possible paths in your own color. Unlike the classic game, you don’t place single hexagons one by one; instead, you place larger composite tiles, and the colors of the already placed tiles aren’t fixed. If you surround an enemy line with your own colors, you can capture it. Each turn, you can either place a new piece or rotate one of the already placed hexagons. If you form a closed loop, it becomes fixed: its tiles can no longer be rotated or captured. You can play against up to three other players, either AI or online. I’m not good at this. I lost against the lowest AI difficulty, but it seems like a solid strategy game. (my despicable playthrough)
  
• 😐 Briefcase (block puzzle): A standard block puzzle, this time the theme is that you’re an assassin assistant, packing their briefcases with whatever they require: guns, bullets, knives… It’s quite basic, but still a decent block puzzle. (my playthrough)
  
• ☹️ Can You Escape: The Collection (mobile game, point&click escape room): A large collection of mobile “escape room” games, minus the ads. Each game is a long sequence of small rooms where you tap on objects to collect items or uncover clues, then unlock the door to proceed to the next room. Most of these games are more than 10 years old, reflecting the mobile game boom of the early 2010s. And given that there are thousands of rooms in total, the puzzle quality isn’t great, ranging from trivial to inscrutable. At least they come with a play-through guide that replaces the usual “watch an ad for a hint” mechanic. If you played them on mobile and want to revisit them for nostalgia—especially since most of them are no longer compatible with modern OS versions—you can take a look, but note that this collection is already available on mobile. (my short playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Cat Squeeze (Sokoban, path finding): A Sokoban-like game where you squeeze through tubes. You play as a claustrophobic cat, so if you exit a tube into a tight 1-tile room, you can push boxes or even explode all the walls around you. This lets you break walls and pipes, creating new paths through layouts that would otherwise be impossible. It’s very good, and there are secret rooms supposedly in there, though I failed to find any. (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Clover's Quadrants (pathfinding): A very challenging pathfinding game in which you modify how far you can move in each of the four directions by collecting movement tokens on your four sides. I showcased this as a short free game more than two years ago, under the name UDLR. This updated Steam version is much improved, with excellent levels, more mechanics, beautiful hand-painted graphics, and a lovely character instead of the plain circle from the earlier jam version. (my playthrough)
  
• 👎 Code 9 (detective, first-person, AI): A detective game with an AI-first approach. All your deductions must be written as a conversation with an AI model. I didn’t play it much, since that put me off.
  
• 😐 Dadum The Dice (die rolling): Roll around as a die on a mission to kill all the other dice. There are different kinds of enemies, which you attack by standing next to them. Some you defeat by having a bigger number than theirs, some by having the same number, and some by adding or subtracting their number from yours. Some are motionless, some patrol on fixed routes, and some hunt you. And then there are the boss fights, which require you to defeat all their sides, not just one. Add stairs and swings connecting large islands, and it’s quite a good dice roller. My major complaint is that there’s no undo, and with some very long boss levels, pressing the wrong key can mean having to play it again and again until you make no mistakes. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Dead Watch (knowledge discovery, time loop, escape room, hidden object): A bizarre time loop puzzle, you find yourself in a huge house full of quirky characters like the Russian comrade, the American cowboy which may or may not be the same as the comrade using a disguise, the stock photo man, the exposition skeleton, the talking cat who likes human food… There’s a clock steadily advancing, and while the door out of the house is sometimes unlocked, you refuse to leave before everyone else also makes it out alive. But someone keeps getting killed, and every time you find a dead body, the loop resets. Can you figure out how to unlock all the doors? Can you find all the hidden coins? Can you safely get everyone out? (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Evergrow: Shards of Tomorrow (puzzle adventure, exploration, various): A mashup of many different types of genres and puzzles, with side scrolling, quick reaction rail ride, pipe puzzles, resource puzzles… But they are all tied together as the adventure of a lone lizard-like creature exploring a deserted world. It looks cool, and I like the variety of genres, but it needs a lot of polish. It was hard to figure out what was interactive. The pipe puzzles required precise positioning, and I personally didn’t like the hunt for hidden objects; screen transitions often left the character hidden (sometimes even stuck) behind some scenery. (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 The Granny Detective Society (spy, detective, fill-in-the-blanks): What if the neighborhood snoop—the old lady who’s always looking out her window—were an actual detective solving crimes? Armed with a photo camera, a meticulously organized agenda, and a lot of patience, you must figure out what really happened in the neighborhood today. Why did the lights go out? Where did the donuts go? Who’s an innocent bystander, and who’s a thief? Carefully piece together the names and professions of all the characters, uncover their real relationships, and soon you’ll join the Granny Detective Society, which grants you access to more tools. Besides inspecting events as an infinitely replayable movie, you also solve word games to expand your vocabulary. It’s charming, with good voice acting and lovable animal characters, but also challenging, with a slowly unraveling story. I particularly liked how the visual-only part of the story seemed to say one thing, but the audio revealed another side. It’s highly recommended. (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Homgard (nonograms, logic): Nonograms with clever twists and a deep, mysterious story. Each level reveals a piece of a giant map and another fragment of the narrative. Put them all together, and you may uncover why the entire city is abandoned. The story is optional, so you can focus on the puzzles, and those are excellent. It’s not just basic nonograms; tiles can be different colors, each with its own mechanic. Any shaded green cell must also have a shaded neighbor of a different color. Red means the whole island is either entirely shaded or empty. Orange only counts areas inside orange; this means you can have 3 purple and 2 orange shaded continuously, and that satisfies a 2 3 clue instead of a 5. There are more colors in the full game, too. It’s a great nonogram game that’s definitely more interesting than vanilla. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 KraDawn (puzzle platformer): A puzzle platformer built around how you use your flashlight. Various objects react differently to light: some move when illuminated, others only when they’re in darkness, and some cease to exist altogether when they’re not seen. You must work out where each object needs to end up—and how to get it there—by controlling both your flashlight’s direction and your own movement through the level. In each level, your goal is to find the “head” ball and place it on the body, which acts like a light switch that illuminates the entire room. It’s quite good overall, and most levels don’t demand too much precision jumping, though a few do. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Looking Up (cozy, mini-puzzles): A very cute and cozy puzzle game. Solve small, flight-themed puzzles across a child’s life, like reassembling a jigsaw-style bird, putting the right feathers in the right spots, and spotting all the birds through a telescope. It’s lovely if you enjoy gentle, easy puzzles! (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Nomori (3D platformer, surreal): A 3D platformer with a very flexible definition of “down.” Portals are sprinkled throughout the world, and entering one might leave you upside down or walking on walls. The result is a non-Euclidean maze where you move boxes to set up future wall-walking paths. It’s very fun—provided you have a good sense of 3D orientation in a thoroughly disorienting world. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Obsidian Moon (detective): A detective game in which all the suspects, locations, testimonies, items, lab reports, and other things are represented as cards. You can perform common actions on these cards, like surveil, analyze, interrogate, and threaten. But each of these actions takes time, and while you can do some actions in parallel, you can’t, for example, have two objects analyzed at the lab at the same time. You can also combine two cards, for example, a suspect and an object means “ask the suspect about this object”, or a suspect and a testimony means “corroborate the testimony”. This is quite clever. You can often waste time on dead ends, get useless clues, or you can sacrifice your sanity. And time isn’t just an abstract concept; at the end of each workday, you have bills to pay. Unless you can build a strong case in a very short time, you’ll be out of money and a job. I liked it, though it barely fits on the Steam Deck's small screen, and I failed to produce the murder weapon for the second case — though that’s more my fault and not the game’s. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Prime Prism (light puzzles, math): Use prisms and mirrors to split rays of light not into colors, but into prime numbers. On the surface, it’s a light-redirection puzzle, with mirrors bending and prisms splitting each beam. But every ray carries a number, and prisms don’t just divide light—they also extract a prime factor from the number it contains. This complicates the solutions a lot, since you don’t just have to get light to the right target, you have to make sure the right number gets there. And even more challenging when other operations are added, and you have to figure out the math needed to obtain certain numbers from the prime factors available. Really neat! (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Sato (puzzle platformer, knowledge discovery, lateral thinking): A very unique game—essentially a platformer—played on tiny asteroids that you can circle and jump between. But the platforming is just a minor part; the real challenge is figuring out how each asteroid works and how to trick it into letting you jump off to the next one. Some are simple, static asteroids you can hop across. Others shrink and grow as you move clockwise and counterclockwise around them. Still others are winding and rewinding time. It can be quite puzzling to figure out a way through! And there’s yet another layer to the game: cryptic puzzles hidden in the overworld, and even a way into a 3D snapshot of an atomic bomb explosion. What is that all about? I can’t wait to find out! (my playthrough, with spoilers!)
  
• ☹️ Scrap Inc (action puzzle, pathfinding, time attack): A puzzle game in the style of Chip’s Challenge, with large maze-like levels, a strict timer, hidden collectibles, and optional extra challenges for each stage. It’s the kind of game where a single mistake often forces a restart, and the focus is on solving each puzzle as quickly as possible to earn an S rank. Even worse, the levels are often full of trees that block your view, so you can’t easily tell which paths are passable or where the collectibles are. You end up bumping into trees just to see whether there’s something hidden under the canopy. (my playthrough)
  
• ☹️ Silence of Elven Mage Rin (Sokoban, knowledge discovery): You are a golem following around an elven mage. You have to help her by opening doors, which involves you pushing boxes and buttons. After a few plain Sokoban levels, a new puzzle is introduced, which doesn’t explain the rules. I’ve had good experiences with other games that require you to figure out the puzzle rules yourself, so I’d welcome a new game focused on knowledge discovery. Unfortunately, there are just too many things wrong with this one… It’s not on a grid, so movement feels a bit imprecise; pushing is actually more like kicking, which means you have to press two buttons to move boxes; there are slow cutscenes in which nothing happens; the puzzles are both easy and somewhat tedious; and the mage’s design leans too heavily into NSFW territory. (my playthrough)
  
• 😐 Sleeping with the Phish (papers-please-like): As the newest intern in the IT department, can you correctly handle all the emails coming your way? This means both triaging legitimate and spurious requests from other employees and spotting phishing attempts from impostors. Just like in Papers, Please, you have to compare each detail of each email with the official documents. Is that the correct email address for the sender? Is that the correct profile picture? Is the request in line with the sender’s job? And so on…That doesn’t sound too bad, but either I’m really bad at this game, or the demo always ends on the third day, regardless of my decisions, because I always fail on the third day. And I really don’t like that the game never tells me what I did wrong, so I’m not learning from my mistakes since I never know how I failed. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Slide & Magic (sliding): A classic sliding game, in which all the movable objects slide until they hit something. You must guide each crystal to a box, and once a box gets a crystal, it closes and turns into a blocking brick. There are other mechanics as well, like barrels that can help (or hinder) you, and single-pass tiles. It’s a decent sliding game. (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Space Revolver (sokoban, puzzle platformer): A puzzle platformer where you can’t jump—but you can rotate the entire world. It’s built from very small levels, which is perfect for me and makes it clear the focus is on thoughtful puzzles rather than platforming, with each level centered on a single key insight. You have to plan where you and each box need to be before you rotate the world, so that boxes don’t kill you or block your path, while also using them to shield yourself from lasers and reach platforms you couldn’t otherwise access. It’s excellent—highly recommended. (my playthrough)
  
• 😐 Waddle Words (word game): An infinite word game where, given some starting letters, you must place them in a grid to form only valid words using all the letters. Once you do that, a new letter is added, and you must again form only valid words, even if that means destroying everything you had before to build a new crossword with different words. You repeat this over and over, either until you get bored or— in another mode—until the timer runs out. You can also play together with friends. Oh, and the word-building part? You don’t type letters into a grid; you push them around as a goose. It’s a funny gimmick, but aside from being amusing for a bit, I don’t find the game particularly interesting. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Whispers of the Hourglass (escape room, Myst-like): A strange 3D puzzle adventure where you solve puzzles to collect clues that help you solve even more puzzles. The clues come in the form of poems, but you don’t know which puzzle each poem refers to or how to map the cryptic poem to the actual puzzle elements. I liked that aspect, though I didn’t enjoy how the puzzles are scattered through an otherwise crowded world full of decorative objects, turning it into a hunt for the real puzzles. Still, it’s a good new idea, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it. (my playthrough)

If you have your own puzzler, adventure, demo, or some new content coming out on mobile or PC? Let us know in the forum or by adding sdumitriu on Steam Chat.

• Another Day with You (casual, time management)
  
• DJ Bunny (point&click)
  
• Case Closed (casual, detective)
  
• Cellchemist (simulation, sandbox)
  
• Color Theory (matching, shooter)
  
• D1ALogue (match 3)
  
• Flict (casual, strategy)
  
• Help Bipboop (point&click, crafting)
  
• No Mana, Just Dice (strategy)
  
• Poker Hands ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ (card game)

• Mommy’s Slipper (hidden object, exploration)
  
• Star Shift Rebellion (strategy, exploration)

• Squeakross: Home Squeak Home added 236 Squeakross puzzles.
  
  
  
  Short Game of the Week: TileKnight[tileknight.com]

  Highlighting a short and free puzzle game every week!

  
  There are three daily puzzles. On a grid filled with chess pieces and numbers, you must find a path that clears all the tiles. Each tile you land on lets you jump to another tile according to the chess piece or number on it. If it’s a chess piece, you move as that chess piece would move. If it’s a number, you can move to any of the eight orthogonal or diagonal tiles that are that number of spaces away. The twist is that you’re not given the starting point. The game is good, with a very helpful tutorial. The easy level is, well, easy to figure out, but the hard one can take a few tries just to find the starting point. If you get stuck, you can request the starting tile to be revealed. The game works in a browser, even on a phone.
  
  
  Not-Quite-Short Game of the Week: Iroban[saructrl.itch.io]

  Highlighting another free puzzle game every week!

  
  A Sokoban-style puzzle game with colored boxes and mechanics like color-changing tiles, box-destroying saws, and bombs. Playable in a browser or on a phone.
  
  
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