I asked Midjourney to make a screenshot for a puzzle game to use as a background, and it gave me what looks to be a screen from a Moss VR level. But Moss 2 is an adventure game! That’s a different day.
In computer puzzle games, the computer itself is just there to show your work. The real game is in your head. The puzzles slowly teach you the workings of the solutions, and ramp up the difficulty as you learn more.
Cryptmaster (2024)
This is a game about words, disguised as an RPG. You have an adventuring group of four characters, who can each do class-appropriate things. You start off knowing how to do maybe one thing; SLICE or YELL or whatever, but by going through the dungeon, trying to escape, you can pick up letters that will let you make ever-more consequential words and eventually escape the dungeon. If someone made a cooperative game of Scrabble where the game itself was trying to kill you — that would be Cryptmaster.
The game is very low-fi, agreeably creepy, and just plain fun.
Humanity (2023)
Bad news. You died. Good news. You were resurrected as a cute Shibu Inu dog! Bad news. You’re still dead, though. As is every other human that ever lived. Good news. They’re all going to heaven! Bad news. But only if you can figure out how to get them there.
It’s like the game Lemmings, except instead of Lemmings, you have billions of humans. The plot, such as it is, has you resurrected as an agent of a god or gods tasked with saving humanity by guiding their souls into the afterlife through a series of increasingly complex platforming puzzles. Each level has secrets to uncover; a correct solution will move the plot along, but you might have missed the super special secret section that would give you an additional way to prod those mindless, trudging souls to their destinations.
The game’s a lot of fun and draws onlookers in 🙂
Sixty Four (2024)
Sixty Four is an addictive cross between a cookie clicker and a factory game. You build machines to mine blocks of materials with which you can build more machines to mine blocks of more difficult to mine materials and so on.
There is a plot to Sixty Four; you’ve woken up in a stark, white world with a machine — you don’t know its purpose — and colored cubes — again, you don’t know anything about it. You are not really physically present, but you can flip switches and build things. You can also communicate by texting your friend, who is trying to help from the outside. As you build, you learn more about why you are here, and what else is in this formless void.
But, mostly the game is about building automated factories that mine stuff so that you can mine more stuff, better, to make even better machines. It has a “just one more thing” quality.
Last Call BBS (2022)
Last Call BBS is the final game from renowned puzzle game creators Zachtronics. The Zachtronics puzzle games have always flirted with being programming puzzles or just straight up brain teasers; this collection of puzzle games does both.
20th Century Food Court harkens back to SpaceChem and Exapunks. Dungeons & Diagrams is a Sudoku-like dungeon builder. I wrote a lot more about the game in this long-ish (for me) article from a couple months ago so I won’t copy and paste it here.
No other game on this list caused me to lose as much sleep as Last Call BBS, though Sixty Four came close. That game is so addicting!)
Tomorrow: Adventure games.
Don’t have much to add beyond, loving this series!! Thanks for writing them!
Thanks! I didn’t realize how many different games I’d played this past year until I started combing through my Steam and PS5 histories. And I only remembered BOARD GAMES after I’d made the lists! So that’s another one to write. I have Some Thoughts about the board games…