In April 2016, developer Tecopark released the original version of Pico Park, a 2D multiplayer puzzle game that's grown into a hugely popular franchise that technically includes three games. That first version is Pico Park: Classic Edition, a simpler and smaller incarnation of Pico Park and its sequel Pico Park 2. In October 2025, the devs accidentally made the Classic Edition free-to-keep forever, planning to switch to a paid plan but forgetting they "can never go back" after flipping the switch.

"PICO PARK : Classic Edition is permanently free!" Tecopark said at the time. But the Classic Edition won't be available permanently, it seems. This Monday, the studio announced that "PICO PARK: Classic Edition will be removed from the store."

Why? "After carefully considering how to continue the PICO PARK series moving forward, we've decided to discontinue this free version," a new Steam post reads. "We’ll let you know once the exact date is set. If you've already downloaded the game, you can continue playing it. This was the very first PICO PARK game, and it celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. Thank you for everything!"

The good news is that people who already have this game in their Steam library should still be able to play it with friends. As the devs said last year, there's no server upkeep because it's all peer-to-peer, which is also why the unintended giveaway wasn't a giant financial disaster.

The bad news is that this version of Pico Park will seemingly be lost to time. Even if it is crude and short, it's still the seed of a hugely viral puzzle game series – not that video games need to meet some list of qualifiers to be worth preserving.

As you might expect, news of this removal – with the exact date of the delisting still to be decided – disappointed or angered some folks online. The post's Steam discussion replies are a chorus of threats to pirate the other Pico Park games or ignore future releases from Tecopark entirely.

I think there are some overreactions mixed in, but I understand the sentiment, especially the argument that this free offering was a great lightning rod to bring players in and push them toward the paid games ($5 for the first one, $9 for the sequel). Tecopark hasn't clearly explained the reasoning for the Classic Edition's removal.

The first reply to the post argues: "'We want people to buy the new one so we're removing the old one.' No thanks. Also for the sake of game preservation, surely you'd want this to be available for as long as possible?"

And I'm only singling this reply out because Tecopark responded to it, saying, "I totally get that point of view!" A means to address the preservation concerns, however, remains to be seen.

Pico Park is also available on Nintendo Switch, and the sequel additionally came to Xbox. Classic Edition is Steam-only, and not listed on the developer's main page at all.

RPG devs apologize to "Steam staff and all of our players" after their game draws 164,000 concurrent players and starts breaking Valve's marketplace.

37 years ago, a developer named Colin Porch started work on a sequel to the classic computer puzzle game Head Over Heels. With the rise of console gaming pushing aside demand for games on early personal computers, that project was shelved – until now. The 81-year-old Porch has just completed and released that sequel, all because an old boss told him about the rising market for retro games.

Return to Blacktooth is available from Thalamus Digital Publishing on Itch.io for both Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga. As in its predecessor, you control a pair of characters – Head and Heels – who have different abilities you need to use to solve puzzles and explore an isometric castle filled with hundreds of rooms. To my fellow Americans, who likely grew up either on console games or post-IBM PCs, it'll look a little weird, but this is bread-and-butter stuff on the computer platforms that were popular in the UK and Europe through the '80s.

Porch, who had a minor role on Head Over Heals, started making the sequel under Ocean Software in 1989, but with the way the market was shifting at the time, it was soon shelved. Porch only started working on it again after attending a company reunion.

"My old boss, a guy called Gary Bracey, he asked me, 'What happened to the sequel you were doing?'" Porch recalls in an interview with ITV (thanks, Time Extension). "And I said, 'Well, you know, I abandoned it.' 'Oh, you need to finish it,' he said. 'Big demand for retro games now.'"

The real struggle was finding out who held "the intellectual property rights to the characters in the game," Porch explains. He doesn't spell out how he tracked down the proper owners, but judging by the copyright info in the trailer for Return to Blacktooth, the rights belonged to modern-day Atari. Atari's been pretty open to working with passionate devs on odd projects in recent years, and it seems this was no exception.

"It's been a labor of love because I was so passionate about the game in the first place," Porch concludes. "The game is full of puzzles and I had a lot of fun devising the puzzles. You know, it's my wits against the player that's going to be playing it."

If you're looking to go old-school, here are the best retro consoles you can get into today.

Portal 2 is pretty handily an all-time classic and among the best co-op games, puzzle games, comedy games, or simply just one of the best games ever made. But that doesn't mean Valve had a smooth journey in getting the brain-bursting sequel to that point. As we've just been reminded, Portal 2 developers apparently went through some "nasty crunch" in the days leading up to the game's launch.

That reminder comes from a recently resurfaced interview between Kiwi Talkz and the game's lead designer, Josh Weier, who acknowledged that the Portal 2 team "loved what we were doing, so we kept adding stuff," despite the impending deadlines looming over everybody's heads.

"My wife was getting really tired of the project, and it [the game] was kind of weirdly like a mistress because I was working all these hours and I was just so caught up in this," Weier recalled at the time. "It's all I thought about. 'What are we gonna run into the next day? Where are we gonna go for design?' It was just this constant stress of, 'Are we gonna mess this up? Are we gonna make something people hate.'"

Part of that anxiety came from the incredible legacy of the first Portal and Valve's spotless track record up to that point.

"I think in the last three weeks [of development] my wife literally was like, 'Look, we're gonna divorce if you don't stop,'" Weier said. "So I called the next day and said I can't come into the office… It wasn't the worst thing in the world because basically at that point we had kind of wrapped up stuff enough that it was OK. But it was a really weird experience because I had gone from, like, 200% on to just, like, 'I gotta be away from this, I gotta take a step back.'"

Weier also wondered how anyone could keep up with that development schedule while being a parent, for example. "It's a hard one to figure out because I feel like video games, in a way, are like a young person's game, just in terms of the amount you have to give into it."

Hearing that Portal 2 nearly ruined a marriage is a good reminder as to why crunch became somewhat of a taboo for studios in the first place. A former Rockstar Games developer also recently remembered that the GTA studio sometimes felt like a prison during Bully's production, and honestly, no games - even the best ones - are worth the mental or physical health of developers.

Stardew Valley is now Steam's top-rated game, with the farming sim dethroning Portal 2 after 14 years at the top

After releasing in April last year, Blue Prince made rounds as one of the best games of 2025, winning various awards and catching the attention of fellow indie gems' developers, including that of Balatro – but its creator's next game likely won't be as ambitious.

Tonda Ros, the mastermind behind developer name Dogubomb and, of course, Blue Prince, reveals as much in a recent interview with Aftermath. First explaining that he's still working to iron out some things in the smash-hit puzzle game – "mostly just polish details" and "a couple more cinematics," as he puts it – Ros says he really wants "to put everything I wanted into the game."

He wasn't able to before launch, because, well, he was overwhelmed.

"I was working, I think, 80 hours a week for eight years straight," Ros admits. That's a lot of hours, and I'm in disbelief he's still got a bit more up his sleeve – but whatever comes after Blue Prince probably won't be as massive an undertaking… understandably, if you ask me.

"Blue Prince will likely be the most ambitious game I ever make, because I don't think I physically can do this again," the mind-bogglingly committed dev states.

He continues: "It was an incredibly long journey, so it might take as much time [to make my next game], but I certainly won't be working as hard… That's just not sustainable now. It's a young man's game." Although his last comment is amusing, I doubt anyone would be able to stomach 80-hour weeks for another near-decade.

Thankfully, however, Ros isn't totally burnt out from developing video games at all.

"The recognition [Blue Prince has received] certainly helps the decision, but I think I did fall in love with game development," as he concludes. "I come from a filmmaking background, but game development just suits me really well. It's fun to take your time and to be able to fulfill your vision without the stress of running a set. I just kind of love it right now, so I'll continue doing it as long as I find it enjoyable."

Here's hoping he finds it enjoyable for a long time – as long as that time is marked by both work and decent breaks to ensure he's not overdoing it again. I'm certain that anything else he creates in the future will prove well-received, regardless.

Blue Prince is a "true hybrid" of video and boardgame genius – the fact that it's an award-winning roguelike was never part of the plan: "Things spiraled way out of control"

It's not every day you see a game as beautiful as indie project All Living Things – but it's also not every day that you meet a beautiful woman. And that's just what this stunning gem's indie developer has gone and done.

Of all the new games I've seen coming this year and beyond, All Living Things stands out as one of the most unique, with its gorgeous stop-motion storybook aesthetic and its animated mysteries.

Playing on the mythic substance of the philosopher's stone and drawing inspiration directly from The Ripley Scroll, a 15th-century alchemical manuscript, it pits players against cryptic poetry, ever-changing hand-crafted visuals, and 12 mind-boggling puzzles.

It's basically everything my medieval history-loving self has ever wanted – but there hasn't been an update in nearly a year on its progress. It turns out that we have one "beautiful woman" to thank for that, as Saint Vulture – as the All Living Things dev is known online – admits in a new post.

"Game development is going slow," they write. "I've met a beautiful woman." Valid, I guess, Saint Vaulture. Very valid.

"Harsh gamedev truth is I'm first off the boat if I hear a siren song," the dev follows up in a reply to their original thread – and unsurprisingly, folks are loving all of this.

One person responds, "Understandable. I hope you enjoy every day." Another says, "Disappointing, but I cannot fault you." Who can, really? This is the sort of dev-to-audience honesty I live for, and I'm evidently not alone, judging by the comments.

Somebody dubs this "the most legit reason for delay announcement I've ever seen in a video game industry," for example – and I, for one, agree. If you do, too, you can give All Living Things a wishlist on Steam and support a budding romance.

Looking for more small developers to support? Browse through our roundup of the coolest upcoming indie games to wishlist now.

As a journalist, even an entertainment journalist, there is an ingrained nostalgia for something like newspaper microfiche. You know, that storage method you've probably seen in movies or TV shows where the plucky protagonists are scrolling through brightly lit images of old newspapers until they suddenly discover the article or photo that blows the case wide open. The puzzle game TR-49 from developer inkle isn't exactly that, but it absolutely scratches the same itch that crops up whenever I see those machines and think, "Boy, that sure would be satisfying."

And it is satisfying to do TR-49's version of the same. As Abbi, a young woman seemingly trapped in a basement with some strange machine largely consisting of dials and a CRT screen, I scroll and read and click and scroll some more. The four-digit dial – two letters, two numbers – allows me to bring up marked records of my choice to peruse and inspect.

A mysterious "Liam" on the radio instructs me to search for a very specific record, because there are bad people looking to stop us from finding it. And so the game goes: dialing, sorting, naming records, and generally playing a complicated bit of interactive fiction, hyperlinks included, with some shockingly stellar voice acting thrown in.

See previous record

While there's ostensibly some sense of urgency here – Liam says our enemies are getting closer all the time – that narrative doesn't seem to actually be backed up mechanically. There's an overarching story that plays out while I dig through the archives and piece together the digital(ish?) lives of Cecil Caulderly, his family, and all of the material that's been ingested by the machine.

That's what it does, by the way. The contraption that makes up the entirety of TR-49's gameplay is functionally a machine that you input written material into and it collates and cobbles together inferences and understandings, and so on. If that immediately makes you think, "sounds like AI, or at least an LLM," you're basically repeating the thought I had time and time again, though TR-49 doesn't exactly say as much.

While technically fairly limited in scope, TR-49 quickly envelops itself in complexities. In the search of the important record in question, you must parse through other records, which means you must find them first. How do you find them? Well, you can piece together clues like "so-and-so was born on this date," or "a follow-up was published two years later by this particular author," which clue you into what sort of dial setting to seek out. Or you can just… put in a set of letters and numbers and hope for the best.

Narrative aspects notwithstanding, the frame of the game fascinated me from the jump. Rather than zooming in on the screen itself and having the player navigate there, the actual machine and room it's in are featured prominently. It's a design choice that really enhances the physicality of the space despite existing entirely digitally, and basically every other design decision complements it.

The dials are analog and chunky with the options for letters and numbers physically circling the screen – which flickers and warps with unstable power – while the archive figuratively picks up and moves from one cataloged source to another rather than simply switch like an internet tab might.

Puzzled reactions

I never quite know how to talk about puzzle design and puzzle games in general. What makes a good puzzle? I managed to solve TR-49 in about seven hours without resorting to looking up solutions. The hint system feels fairly unobtrusive, though I've seen the complaints online that it's overbearing. I never quite felt like I was being led by the nose, though Abbi and Liam could be awful chatty at times. Instead, the design of the game lends itself to serendipitous discoveries like, for example, discovering material at say EK-11 because you were moving away from CC-11 and into the EK archive, and it automatically loads up whenever you accurately complete a dial combination – even if you're in the middle of putting it in.

What I do know for certain is that I initially booted up TR-49 knowing very little about it. I'd seen the initial trailers, thought "huh," and moved on. As I learned about my task and some initial information on the world, I found myself plucking in potential archival destinations in order to just brute force solution. There are only so many different combinations, after all.

As I read more of material presented and the comments made by previous users, I became more compelled to track specific data points and functions, going so far as to physically write down a short list of common ones to refer back to, as I collected the names – "My God, He Dances" and "Revisions" and "Astral Perplexities" – and locations of books and letters and notes and reference material before then attempting to associate them together. Each successful association accompanied by material suddenly and mysteriously becoming more legible and recognizable. Another data point among many, strung along in a path ultimately concluding with the record I'd been sent to find – and the mystery of why, how, and to what end up in all of that.

That, for me, is a good puzzle.

TR-49 is out now for PC via Steam and iOS. For more recommendations, head on over to our Indie Spotlight series.

Indie developer Petter Malmehed released his unconventional alternate reality puzzle game After Hours in 2018, and according to Malmehed himself, it did alright, even if it wasn't a big commercial success. However, in recent months and years, he's seen its user reviews on Steam gradually decline at the same time as its completion rate is steadily dropping, and he thinks he knows why.

Email. And super young people. They don't get it, apparently. For my elder Gen-Z and older readers, this may be confounding. What's the problem with email? You hit compose, you type in a brief subject line, and then the rest goes in the body, with some incredibly antiquated sign-off like "all best" before your digital signature. Well, if the 'subject line' part of all of that left you scratching your head, you're substantiating Malmehed's theory.

In a Reddit post and in conversation with Polygon, Malmehed explained that in 2024, he started seeing reviews for After Hours sink "lower and lower," and he didn't know why. He was also getting specific feedback that the game was "too hard" and seeing completion rates plummet, and so he did a little digging. It turns out, an NPC named Sarah, who is able to receive real-life emails from players crucial to advancement of the story, held all the answers.

Malmehed looked in Sarah's email inbox and found thousands of emails from 2025 alone. Concerningly, he also saw that "about a third of them" didn't have anything in the main body - everything was crammed into the subject line, which was preventing the in-game system from identifying the keywords necessary to respond.

"That's something I've noticed a lot of young people are doing these days," he told Polygon. "So I believe the users are in general pretty young."

Of course, there's no way to nail down precisely which and how many variables are contributing to a game's downward trajectory - especially when that game only has 57 total Steam reviews in the first place - but Malmehed is taking the blame and working on tools to better communicate how the game works.

"No form of modern communication requires a subject and a body — it's easy to see how people [who are] not familiar with email aren't filling out both fields."

Digging into Malmehed's more recent projects, I think it is extremely wise for him to be accepting some level of responsibility in all of this. His 2025 puzzler Palm Cracker takes place on the screen of a stolen PalmPilot, a device so old even I almost forgot what it was, and I'm in my mid-30s. Ironically, however, that game has the highest Steam reviews of Malmehed's body of work with a "very positive" rating at the time of writing. Maybe that's the key: embrace the millennial nostalgia and make a Tamagotchi game next.

Or just pick something from our list of the best PC games to play right now.

As a central figure in the creation of the PS4, PS5, and PlayStation Vita, and credited on numerous classic series, including Spyro and Crash Bandicoot, you’d expect Mark Cerny to have pretty discerning taste. This is exemplified by his experience with Pikmin, a game he reveals changed his life.

Cerny spoke about what those tiny multi-coloured aliens meant to him during an interview on My Perfect Console. "I thought it was such an emotionally involving story," he says. "Poor Captain Olimar, he crash lands and he's got 30 days to reassemble his ship or he'll run out of oxygen and die and he's sending letters home every day. And for me that was just transformative."

He encountered Pikmin at a time when he was playing "smaller, lighter games," generally, specifications Olimar and his lemming-like creatures excel at. But he’s quite specific in pointing out, it's the narrative of the first, where you're finding a way for the captain to get home, that drew him in. The sequel didn't resonate quite as much.

"I'm a sucker when it comes to story, right?” he explains. “But then for Pikmin 2, it's totally different. So they're on Earth, they're running around picking up trash on Earth. That's the storyline, if you recall. Literally, you're running around somebody's bathroom floor in Pikmin 2. And in one of those, you're running from debt collectors, if I have that right."

That's a slightly unflattering recollection of Pikmin 2, as the game does go back to the homeworld of those adorable little plant-like companions. But I get his point: the first is tight, with a narrative thrust that resonates more genuinely.

His comments come right as Olimar's friends have made a comeback. Pikmin 4 arrived in 2023, a decade after the third, introducing a whole other generation of wanna-be spacefarers to the joys of leading around anthropomorphic sprouts. Though hints otherwise haven't yielded a new entry yet, I'm always ready for more Pikmin, regardless of what planet it's set on.

A brutal Pikmin strategy allows you to beat the game with just three throws, but you'll have to commit some atrocities to do it

Nintendo lent some of its greatest minds to the development of Mario's Picross, sending legendary creators such as Yoichi Kotabe, Tsunekazu Ishihara, and Mario's father, Shigeru Miyamoto, to the third-party studio in order to "personally" teach the team Mario's fundamentals.

In an interview with Famitsu, CEO and founder of Mario's Picross's studio Jupiter Corporation, Makoto Nakayama, recalls Nintendo's involvement in the puzzling spin-off. Nakayama previously worked at the gaming giant's first-party studio Intelligent Systems, where he made connections with Nintendo bigwigs like Satoru Iwata, Masahiro Sakurai, and Shigeru Miyamoto.

After starting his own studio, Nakayama was talking about adapting picture-based newspaper puzzles into video games when Miyamoto offered his beloved Italian son as tribute. As translated by GamesRadar+, Nakayama describes how the partnership between Jupiter and Nintendo was a "perfect" match. "If we were working on a big project, it would have been completely different," Nakayama says. "But because we would only be working for between six months to a year, it was perfect."

However, Nintendo did more than just offer up Mario's star power to the studio. "They sent over [Yoichi] Kotabe to supervise everything," Nakayama recalls. "He worked with [Studio Ghibli's Hayao] Miyazaki on [TV series] Heidi, Girl of the Alps… Kotabe taught Meguro how to draw Mario."

For most, Heidi would be low down the list of Kotabe's accomplishments. He also worked with Miyazaki on Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, as well as at Nintendo, supervising the animation for Pokemon X and Y, and many of the Pokemon movies.

While Kotabe might have taught the managing director, Nakayama couldn't help but participate in a bit of one-upmanship. "Miyamoto personally taught me," he says when talking about how he was coached on the plumber's fundamentals. Not to be shown up, Meguro piped in with a name drop of his own, adding "[Pokemon's Tsunekazu] Ishihara taught me his game design know-how."

The Legend of Zelda CDi games and Mario is Missing were released just before Mario's Picross began development, so Nintendo might have learned a few lessons on third-party oversight for its biggest series.

After leaving Fire Emblem studio, Donkey Kong veteran and Mario's Picross creator couldn't hire his former co-workers or he'd face Nintendo's wrath: "It shows a lack of decency"

Mario's Picross creator and CEO of Jupiter Corporation, Makoto Nakayama, says that he couldn't coax developers from his former workplace to join him at his new company, because he was worried that Nintendo would no longer work with him.

Nakayama was previously one of the founding members of Nintendo first-party developer Intelligent Systems, which helped develop Mario Bros., Metroid, and Fire Emblem during his tenure. While he worked with a number of omega-talented superstars over the years, such as Satoru Iwata, Masahiro Sakurai, and Mario's dad Shigeru Miyamoto, he knew that if he coaxed "even a single employee" from his former studio to his new company, he would no longer be able to take advantage of his juicy connections.

In an interview with Famitsu that's been translated by GamesRadar+, Nakayama describes the struggles of hiring talented employees, while not upsetting his closest ally. "At the time that I started the company, I had just finished working for Intelligent Systems," Nakayama explains. "If I took even a single employee from Intelligent Systems with me I knew that I would lose the ability to work with Nintendo. It shows a lack of decency."

That doesn't mean that Nakayama wasn't able to start his company without any of his former co-workers, as he was able to recruit Mario Paint creator Noriaki Teramoto. In fact, Nakayama describes working closely with Intelligent Systems to hire talented developers. "I spoke to someone who had already left the company, Mario Paint creator Teramoto, and asked if he would do programming," Nakayama says. "But there were still a lot of roles to fill. The head of human resources from Intelligent Systems would say to me 'there are 10 people left in the interview process, but we're only going to take five. I'll introduce you to the other five.'"

Jupiter's first game ended up being Mario's Picross thanks to Nakayama's connections. In fact, it was Miyamoto himself that suggested the company use Mario's name for their first game. After discussing the idea of turning a popular type of magazine puzzle into a video game, "Miyamoto said 'you can use Mario'," Nakayama recalls.

The relationship was beneficial for both parties. Nintendo was between Mario games, and was looking for a way to keep the Italian plumber in the public consciousness while developing the next entry. If only I could find someone to introduce me to Shiggsy.

Super Smash Bros. and Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai says "it's best to just play games, instead of looking at who made them," so please don't perceive him

Lumines Arise does for this falling block puzzler as Tetris Effect did for Tetris. Enhance's take on Tetris packed synthetic flair, using pumping music, oodles of particle effects, and pulsating visuals to take the titular idea of the Tetris effect – seeing the falling blocks in your mind and dreams after playing – and to celebrate it as something that connects us through the human experience. And, by gosh, they've done it again. If you love previous Lumines games, this is a luscious release that accomplishes the same task – Lumines Arise is Lumines transcended.

Thanks to playing hours of this unique block puzzler, I can see its own shapes forming when I close my eyes – the Lumines take on the real-life 'tetris effect' (does that make it just 'lumines arise'?'. These endless falling squares aren't just lonely blocks, but chunks of corners yearning to connect before bursting. And what's that? A groove! A beat! Before I know it, I'm breaking it down Lumines style, organizing colors into neat piles before a beat indicator travels from the left side of my brain to the right eliminating the blocks. Far from popping my brain cells, though, I feel charged. Playing Lumines Arise and being on a roll makes me feel like a genius. Until the tempo gets the better of me and I'm drowned in checkerboard distress. At times, the Lumines Arise can feel like anxiety. At others, eureka manifest.

Drop it like it's block

But it's still not quite Tetris. What is? But, with this genre, it's different blocks for different folks. I'm not going to yuk anyone's Col-umns. I myself have been known to battle jetlag by comfort gaming Pokemon Puzzle Challenge on the Game Boy Color until my digits go numb. I'm not totally convinced that's a particularly good game to be honest. I have no idea what the critical consensus is on Pokemon Puzzle Challenge. It's there, and I like to play it. Even more than any other genre, the falling block puzzler often feels like a matter of personal taste.

The difference between Tetris and Lumines is important to remember. Despite coming from the same studio as Tetris Effect, Lumines Arise is a completely different beast, blocky aesthetics aside. That is to say, if you try to play Lumines like Tetris. You will die. Or fail, or whatever happens to the Lumines player when they've gunked up the works good and proper.

Yes, blocks fall down from the top of the screen from a visible queue, but unlike its vertically-stacking peers, Lumines uses a game board that's stretched horizontally, allowing the PSP original to take advantage of the handheld's at-the-time unique widescreen format. Each falling block is a 2x2 cluster mixing together one of the game's two colors (or, rarely, just the one). That doesn't make for a lot of different configurations – two lines of blocks next to each other; and L-shape of one color with a solitary corner brick; the dreaded alternating checkerboard.

Lumines' immediate simplicity belies cruelty. Clearing blocks requires connecting at least 2x2 shapes of them together, bigger connections able to be formed by attaching more pairs or other multiplications. End up with too many disconnected colors, either buried alone or in lines, and you'll quickly drown your game board in junk – panic can rise as you're cut off from salvation.

On the flip side, there's an immense satisfaction to finding order in the chaos, expertly clumping together colors so they all pop at once, clearing one color so that only the other color remains and you can do the same again. Well balanced play means flip-flopping between both, but as Lumines Arise gets faster, and you get too comfortable, mistakes will happen. It's one thing knowing intellectually that if you split a certain block configuration in twain by hanging off an edge, one color will perfectly fall to fill a slot below – but it's another doing it consciously while under pressure.

Further increasing that mounting pressure is the beat itself. Almost like recording software, a line constantly moves across the game board – only clearing primed blocks as it sweeps past them. Unlike something like Tetris clearing a line as soon as it's made, or Puyo, well, popping as soon as a match comes together – in Lumines Arise you must wait. That can make it dicey enough, mere seconds feeling like an eternity as you grasp for whatever space you can, but it can also make you greedy – can you drop more blocks faster to make the most of an already primed bubble in order to earn combo points? The Roman Empire fell in much the same way.

Some accommodations can save your skin in dicey situations. Special connective blocks marked with arrows allow you to chain a strand of connected colors together to pop no matter the shape as long as you just plonk them next to the same type – real life-savers, though rare. Likewise, Burst mode – Lumine's Arise's big new feature – will freeze the beat for a limited amount of time, while also allowing your next color match to push alternate colors temporarily off the screen, letting you pile on the matches for a huge burst (and then giving you plenty of the other color to play with as they all fall back onto the screen afterwards). It's not quite as intuitive as Tetris Effect's Zone power, but Lumines is simply a more complex set of rules, so it tracks.

My little soda pop

Plenty of tutorials and missions teach you how to play Lumines effectively, though it's also a game that you simply get better at through repetition. Lumines Arise's features make this the best way to play, the synesthetic nature of each stage joyously beckoning you into a flow state. At times, these sensory stages can feel overwhelming, especially as they transition from one state to another changing not only background visuals and music but the presentation of the colors themselves.

One stage might have black circles and golden diamonds, and then all of a sudden there are crabs there, and now water is spilling into the level, and then you're matching nuts and squirrels are running around the stage. It can be distracting, but it's part of the fun. Thematically, it connects the idea of creating order from chaos with each puzzling Lumines round to how we do the same that's also part of the real world – whether that's nature simply thriving, or getting sweaty in a thumping nightclub. It's an electric concept that works just as well in Lumines Arise as it does in Tetris Effect.

While I think I prefer Tetris Effect overall, that might be just because I like Tetris more. I'm not sure I'm a fan of reviews that get meta and talk about the experience of the review itself, but there is something inherently difficult about reviewing falling block puzzle games like this one. How much value is there in me reviewing the rule set that is Lumines while reviewing Lumines Arise? With Tetris games, how much do you need to review the rules of Tetris every time compared to how it's presented and tweaked in a particular new entry? Lumines, as a type of a game, has a solid and satisfying set of rules for how it works. Lumines Arise continues this forward, and feels better than ever through tiny tweaks and presentation.

What I can say is, as I'm finishing up this review, I can feel the Lumines Arise effect (does that work?) pulling at my fingers, eager to boot it up for another few rounds of matching blocks and catchy beats draw me deep into a blocky flow state. Lumines Arise is a terrific revitalization of Lumines as a puzzle game, and while my affection for it can rise and fall – each joyous bubble can get pretty big before, inevitably, it has to pop to the beat.

Lumines Arise was reviewed on PC, with a code provided by the publisher.

What should you play next? Check out our new games calendar for more!

As I drag my little skeleton train across a checkered board in Spooky Express, a track starts to appear that mirrors my movement. With a zombie waiting on a platform nearby, I have to map out the track in such a way that I can pick up my undead passenger, deliver him to his grave, and also reach the adjoining track on the other side. It's a puzzling conundrum, since I only have a set amount of space to lay down my track, and I can't loop back on myself. But it's undeniably pleasing when my zombie is safely tucked up in the dirt, and I'm on my merry way to pick up more monsters.

As a conductor who has to plan out the routes for the only rail service in Trainsylvania that caters to the undead, it at times feels like I'm mapping out my own on-the-rails amusement park ride. From picking up vampires, demons, and zombies, to trying to scare away human passengers with the creepy commuters I already have on board, there are so many puzzle challenges to work my way through, and I love how many adorably spooky interactions I uncover as I try to figure out the solutions for levels. Complete with a charming artstyle and lots of different thematic locations, Drakenk and Friend's isometric puzzler is helping my horror-averse self really get in the mood for the Halloween season.

All aboard

I'll be the first to admit I'm not the most adept or practiced player when it comes to the puzzle genre, which is why I immediately appreciate how approachable Spooky Express is. As you try to map out your tracks to pick up passengers and reach the track that lets you exit out on the other side of the level, you move your train forward to create a track, and backwards should you want to undo it. If you get too far and realize you can't reach the exit or the passengers, you can reset the level with the click of a button. This essentially means you can experiment until you figure out the solution.

Some levels can be real head-scratchers, though, with one early level upping the ante by involving multiple vampires to pick up and deliver to their coffins, along with a zombie. Each one is placed at different points on the isometric board. I spend a while moving back and forth, seeing if I can find the solution myself, but soon I find myself getting a bit stuck. Thankfully, there's also a very helpful hint system. When you use it, a partial piece of transparent green track appears to show you that you have to set down a track there in order to solve the level. It's a very welcome touch that proves to make life much easier for puzzle novices like me.

While you'll unlock more levels each time you complete one, I also love the fact that you can actually unlock all available levels within the in-game menu. So, should I get stuck on one, I can pop out and try another one until I feel ready to return to the one that stumped me. It's actually a great way to ensure I can experience all the game has to offer without being locked behind my own ability to find solutions.

And there are an impressive number of puzzle challenges on offer here, too, with a sizable map packed full of different levels set across various spooky locations. From pumpkin patch pitstops to dark, demon-summoning spaces, and creepy forests, I love how much variety is on offer, and how changing levels keep things feeling fresh as you try to complete more train routes.

The amusement park feel really comes to life for me, though, thanks to the little interactions you can come across as you try to find solutions. At one point, for instance, I had two demon passengers on board, and thanks to some wrong moves on my part, they both passed by a human interloper waiting on a platform. While the first caused the poor person to jump with fright, the second demon ended up burning them to a crisp. Then, when I was trying to get some vampires back to their coffins, another human unfortunately got the kiss of death, with my route bringing the fanged fiend in close proximity to their neck.

Sure, it's unfortunate for the humans, but these events did earn me some achievements, so their momentary sacrifice at the hands of my puzzle solution attempts was completely worth it. There's evidently a lot of thought put behind the many levels you can work through, and it also succeeds at feeling very welcoming for the most unseasoned of players.

If you're looking for something to play this Halloween season (and you're a scaredy cat like me), you absolutely should get on board with the Spooky Express. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some more undead to track down.

Spooky Express is out now on PC, iOS, and Android. Get more recommendations in our Indie Spotlight series.

For the first 10 minutes of Strange Antiquities, I just look at everything. The shelves of the candle-lit shop are already filled with oddities. There's a lot to take in, including a vial full of glowing blue, a small wooden stag statue, a shriveled human hand with a swirl of gold on one finger, and a pendant with a green eye that's definitely looking around as much as I am. I'm obsessed, and I've not even opened the door to a single customer yet.

If you've played the original game, Strange Horticulture, you'll know that this isn't just a shop. While on the surface, yes, it's a place where people come to buy goods, there's a darkness and a curiosity here that makes this one of the best puzzle games I've played since Blue Prince. This little shop is equal parts a library and a puzzle box. Customers come in with specific needs, whether that's something more lighthearted like wanting to have better eyesight to get back into painting to something more sinister, like trying to cure the blackened eye syndrome that's taking over the town. Curses, spirits, and other evocations are a constant in this town, but it's on you to figure out how to help the townsfolk.

Horror tomes

You'll get either a request for an effect or a specific artifact from your denizens, but from there it's over to you. Over the course of the game, you'll gain a number of books that will help you track down the item you'll need. The Strange Artefacts Guide to Occult Objects will essentially become your bible, as it lists out the names of the items and what they can do to help - or hinder. You can narrow down your search from the visual description of the item or potentially the image accompanying the outline, although it definitely won't ever just be a picture of the thing you need. One clue I had was that an object was about the same weight as a human heart, which was a note in another book or scrap of paper I'd found. Suddenly, the weighing scales on the counter made sense.

Another book might give you a guide to gemstones and their powers, while another lists out hermetic symbols, which will come in more handy than you'd think. It's like unlocking a new language, figuring out what the clues are within the notes, and then applying them to the items lining your shelves.

Handily, you can examine all the objects too, from checking out their color and composition to find out what they're made of, to how they feel, smell, or sound, or even how they make you feel. Nothing like picking up something that you immediately want to put down again to give you a sense that it might not be an item used for the good of mankind. But again that's a choice you also have to make. Sometimes you might get suggestions that two different items might solve a customer's problem - one just might have some… side-effects.

Explore or fail

Part of the puzzle box that is Strange Antiquities is actually finding the items that aren't yet on your shelves. You'll be given clues at the end of each day, as well as from some patrons, that you can solve by exploring the town of Undermere, or even specific locations within it. A scrap of paper with half a letter, a playing card with an odd shape marked in gold, a mention of a statue and a pointing finger, there's so much variety here. I desperately don't want to spoil any puzzle solutions, but some of the ways you unlock new items are so satisfying in a way that makes you feel really clever. Always a boon for any puzzle game. Between deduction and detective work there's so much to love about the way Strange Antiquities presents the problem-solving to be done.

And of course there's the shop itself. The minute you step inside, there's a cabinet over to the left that's locked behind a metal grill with a very obvious keyhole. Another secret panel is hidden behind a crank wheel, clearly missing an amulet of some kind to place inside Indiana Jones-style.

Before long, you're starting to add little tags marking out the items that now have names and associated powers. You start to get a bit more confident, understanding how the books relate to each other, and wading deep in the murky stories and mysteries that are plaguing Undermere. As much as Strange Antiquities is all about the puzzles, it's also about discovering the locals and what the heck is going on. With so much clearly at stake, it's so easy to get lost in this game. And I highly recommend that you do.

Strange Antiquities is out now on Switch and PC via Steam. To see what else we've been enjoying, head on over to our Indie Spotlight series.

Dogpile finally answers the question: what if the yard where you kept puppers well into the double digits was vertical? It also answers the question: what if when two similar dogs touched they became a bigger dog? The answer, as I find out during my Steam Next Fest demo, is that it creates a fun and compelling, erm, dogbuilder I can't keep my paws off. I just have to cram more good boys into my garden!

From developers Studio Folly (Gubbins), Foot, and Toot Games (who are also working on the seriously intriguing My Arms Are Longer Now), Dogpile's art style is gorgeous, with striking designs for different breeds and block, cartoony colors. Designed for repeat play, Dogpile is the kind of game I can see myself cumulatively losing plenty of hours to. It's also perfect for trying as a demo, which I encourage you to do yourself (our Steam Next Fest guide explains more).

In the doghouse

Dogpile's genius comes from a merge of its own, taking tactical deck drafting and combining it with playful physics. Hands of dogs from your deck are drawn onto the top of the screen for you to literally drag the pup above your lightly curved yard and drop 'em in. Taking cues from playing cards, the smallest dogs are aces, growing into larger, more complex shapes as the ascend in dog number.

When two dogs of the same number touch, they merge to become a dog with a higher number – whether that's immediately after you unleash them into the yard or if they get nudged around and touch later. Like Tetris, it's game over if your dogs overflow from the top of the screen, so continuing to merge so you have fewer dogs that take up less space is vital.

Yet, the larger, twistier shapes of bigger dogs can be hard to handle on their own, like the particularly pudgy eighth dog the dalmatian. And what happens when those big chonky floofs block off access to smaller dogs below? Successful merges are immensely satisfying, but it can also be tough to optimize your space below. But there's nothing better than the feeling of all your pups being in the right place.

Dogpile is more than a simple, merger, though. You also need to constantly accrue bones and cash from your combinations. Pet Shop cards mean you can spend money to fill out your deck with higher level dogs with unique effects, and special stamps for your collar that give special buffs. Reach your bone goal, meanwhile, and you can use the dog wash to further boost your pets, or cut out lower levels you've grown past from your deck (as a healthy trim – there's a wholesome energy here). Fail to reach the bone goal in the turns given, though, and you're in the doghouse, meaning you have to take on a negative effects – which may involve fleas. It's a loop closer to Ballionaire than Balatro, and it's fun to see consequences play out.

From boosting the merge rewards with best in show ribbons, to dealing with lover dogs who are prone to magnetizing towards other dogs to keep the pile of puppers shifting, there's plenty of complications to come up against in Dogpile, whether that's to help, hinder, or sometimes in between. As with any arcadey game like this, as I learn the rules I'm constantly kicking myself – oh, if only I used this power here and not there, or waited to drop this dog before this other one! But, all the more reason to reshuffle the dogs, and go for another round. Dogpile is coming soon to PC.

A player before me destroyed a bridge in this Steam Next Fest demo, so I had to build it again in this narrative adventure where your choices have consequences for others

Shigeru Miyamoto's overlooked Game Boy title Mole Mania has been given the Link's Awakening DX treatment from modders.

The exact same year that Miyamoto directed Super Mario 64 and produced the likes of Pokémon Red and Blue, Mario Kart 64, and Kirby Super Star came the action puzzle game Mole Mania, which was about a mole trying to save his family from a farmer who looks suspiciously similar to Mario. And since its protagonist Muddy Mole only ever appeared in Mole Mania (aside from being a Spirit in Smash Bros), the game is about as close to a forgotten classic as you can have from one of the most famous game designers.

Obviously Shigeru Miyamoto is one of the most well known and beloved game creators of all time, thanks to being the creator of Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, and – perhaps most culturally significant – Pikmin, as well as producing the likes of Pokemon and Metroid Prime. However, within all of those massive hitters are some lesser known titles.

Still, Mole Mania has clearly retained a fanbase, as Time Extension recently spotted modder Marc Robledo and graphic artist Kensu William have released a Mole Mania DX edition (DX, in this case, references the Game Boy Color port of Link's Awakening). This Mole Mania mod turns the original green-and-black Game Boy game into a vibrant, full-color version, and it could easily pass for an official release with how good it looks.

Provided you have your own copy of Mole Mania to dump the ROM to your Game Boy Color emulator of choice, you'll be able to apply the patch and go to mole town. Robledo also mentions in the replies that they are working on a DX version of arguably the best Game Boy game ever made with Donkey Kong '94, and if it's as good looking as this mole, I'm already in.

Nintendo devs were so obsessed with Konami's legendary 1994 dating sim that they filled Super Mario 64's code with references to it

Back at Summer Game Fest 2023, I tried to get my hands on basically every possible game I could at the event. This meant plenty of smaller titles, and many have come and gone since then, but few have occupied the same amount of headspace in the years since as Henry Halfhead, a sandbox puzzle game from developer Lululu Entertainment about the life of half a head named Henry that can possess objects.

Yes, you heard that correctly; Henry Halfhead's protagonist is Henry, and he's half a head. Mechanically, this means he can't really… interact with much. He can hop on top of things or bump into them, but that's the extent of it. But with the push of a button, Henry can inhabit objects ranging from bushes to pots to batteries to paper – and these all have their own sort of rules.

For example, if you inhabit a tube of paint, you can shoot bits of paint out of it until it's squeezed empty. You can then jump out of the paint tube and inhabit the little squirts of paint itself to roll around and color. You can also, instead, choose to eat the nubs of paint. Or paint and then eat. There is also actual food like tomatoes and pasta and apples to be eaten, but Henry Halfhead isn't in the business of telling you what you can't do.

Critical path

Not to say there isn't some direction. The overall brief narrative – about two or three hours worth of it – follows Henry's life from the time he's a baby all the way to the end. There are certain tasks required to move on like tearing a page from a calendar or walking home or similar, but everything between is up to you, the player.

And that's where Henry Halfhead really shines. It's a bit reminiscent of the initial feeling that Scribblenauts gave me all those years ago, with constant experimentation leading to delightful surprises. When I eat an apple and a seed pops out, can I plant that seed? What happens if I water it? If I plug in the toaster and jump into a sink full of water, what happens? (You can guess what happens.)

In fact, this playful creativity is absolutely supported by the game's narrative despite the task-oriented nature. I won't spoil exactly what happens here given how brief the story is overall, but just know that the delightful absurdity of its premise – half a head possessing various inanimate objects – while still trying to live a life is a core struggle that resolves in a satisfying way.

Joy to create

At its best, Henry Halfhead is a series of scenarios beginning with "Can I do that?" and then doing that. Most of the narrative scenarios are fairly straightforward and simplistic, but a couple of them right in the middle absolutely cut loose and let you really play with a number of different objects in different ways for a lengthy period of time. I don't want to talk about how long I tried (and failed) to make spaghetti in a toilet, but it does seem worth mentioning that I did try.

And this was all while playing on my own. Henry Halfhead also features local co-op, letting two players cause twice as much chaos or solve puzzles twice as fast. Or both! More than once, it occurred to me that having a second half a head zooming about might add up to a single full head and make everything a bit more convenient. Maybe I'd have even sorted out my toilet spaghetti; a man can dream.

Henry Halfhead is out now on PS5, Nintendo Switch, and PC. To see what other indie gems we've been enjoying lately, be sure to check out our Indie Spotlight series.

Lego Voyagers from developer Light Brick Studio, the same folks behind the critically acclaimed Lego Builder's Journey, lives up to its pedigree with a carefully crafted, playful, and earnest adventure focusing on two friends (represented by blue and red Lego bricks with an eye, controlled by two different players) reclaiming and restoring a spaceship.

There are basically two schools of thought when it comes to gameplay design in a Lego game: there are the IP-based games where Lego is a blank slate to paint with Batman or Star Wars or Marvel, and then there are the games that specifically lean into the nature of play and discovery and building something from nothing. While not entirely steeped in the latter, Lego Voyagers certainly leans that way more than not.

Functionally, two players must navigate through a series of puzzles by activating switches, climbing, jumping, and generally building Lego bricks together or breaking them apart in various ways. It's an entirely nonverbal affair, though the little player-representing blocks can make sounds when you hit a button. For the most part, these are meaningless inflections, but they can also be something else entirely depending on context. (My partner and I would not stop making both go CHOO CHOO as noisily and as frequently as possible when we realized it had changed upon boarding a train.)

If you're looking for a lengthy experience or something more freeform, Lego Voyagers is not for you. It's linear, start to finish, and took me and my partner (who is not particularly skilled at platforming and therefore not a natural fit for the title) roughly four to five hours to complete over two sessions. It's interesting enough to roll around and experience the game's brief narrative, but I have a hard time imagining returning to Lego Voyagers, now that I've completed it, for any reason other than introducing it to somebody new.

Built to solve

While charming and easy enough to logic your way through, Lego Voyagers does contain a couple of skill-based difficulty spikes that are shocking considering how gentle the game is about failure otherwise. If you accidentally roll off the edge into the abyss, you're pretty much immediately transported right back to the base you fell from. The isometric camera sometimes makes jumps – the judging of distance and depth – tricky, so a quick reset is much appreciated.

But a couple of puzzles require some careful coordination between both players to complete. This experience is perhaps colored by my co-op partner not being particularly gifted at this sort of game, but even with that caveat considered, three or so puzzle solutions still stick out like Duplo among Lego. And it's not even that they're bad puzzles; we did solve them in the end, but it was a genuine challenge compared to the vast majority of the game's puzzles, which I would describe as "thinkers" but not exactly difficult.

Also, to be clear, while my co-op partner isn't great at this sort of game, they are someone I know extremely well and have for over a decade – and we were playing on the couch next to each other, strategizing over every decision and discussing what bricks to grab, where to play them, what switches to pull when, and so on. Lego Voyagers co-op can also be done online, and I cannot fathom how you'd actually get anything done without an additional layer of voice chat. Roll around on objectives and make pitchy in-game grunts constantly? Some of the more timing-relevant puzzles don't have, well, time for that.

These are minor complaints in the grand scheme of things, and Lego Voyagers' "grand scheme" being less than half a dozen hours makes them even more minor. The closest comparison I have for the experience of playing through Lego Voyagers might be a nice bowl of stew or a page from my daily puzzle calendar. Like a lunch of stew, playing Lego Voyagers is good, and satisfying, and by and large to my expectations, but it's not exactly filling. Alternatively, like my daily puzzle, it's nice to put some effort into the logic without any real concern about being right or wrong.

The stakes in Lego Voyagers boil down to, "it takes longer to do." If you can't figure out a given solution, you just… keep trying. Take as long as you want. Take 15 hours to play, if you want, nobody's really counting, anyway. Sometimes it's nice to play a game that fundamentally understands it's about the journey, but it doesn't hurt that Lego Voyagers has a pretty good ending as well.

Lego Voyagers was reviewed on a PS5 Pro, playing locally, with a review code provided by the publisher.

The stealthy spirit of Arkham Knight returns in Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, and I never believed a Lego game could pull this off

Planet of Lana 2 is, simply put, an immediate delight. Picking up where its predecessor left off, playing around 45 minutes of the puzzle-platformer at Gamescom 2025 gave me a delectable taster of what's to come, with protagonist Lana and her cat-like friend Mui investigating a new mystery on the planet Novo.

In my demo, I'm given a taster of several different sections, taking me across a snowy biome, a tropical beach, a man-made mechanical space, and a lush forest. Much like the first game, everything looks gorgeous, with vibrant colors and detailed scenery that makes the world of this 2D adventure feel deep and expansive, and oozing with atmosphere. If I wasn't on a time-limit, I'd have loved slowly meandering through these areas, soaking it all up.

Mui phone home

The sections I get my hands on involve a blend of puzzles and stealth sections – directing both Lana and Mui in order to overcome obstacles and sneak past foes. Guiding Mui to different areas to solve problems as a 'team' feels a little bit like being in a one-man-band – almost like playing a co-op game with two controllers – but it's very satisfying to piece things together, and nothing beats the warm, fuzzy feeling of calling your little feline companion back to you after a job well done.

Mui's skills aren't limited to simply moving around and completing simple tasks like cutting ropes (although they can do that, too). In one section at the aforementioned beach, I use Mui's powers to control a fish, which has its own ability to leave clouds of ink in the water. This is particularly handy since my actual path forward is blocked by an aggressive shark-like creature that charges forward and attacks as soon as I enter its line of sight. Using the fish's ink-spraying skill, I obstruct its view before jumping back to control Lana and finally proceed.

Puzzles like this are fairly simple, albeit still satisfying. However, that's not to say that there aren't any head-scratchers. One particularly tricky problem involves trying to reunite Lana and Mui after breaking the cute companion out of some kind of lab. Clearing the way involves sliding around huge blocks (would it be a puzzle-platformer without one of these?) which have to be inserted into specific places in order to unlock the doors ahead. At this point, one of the developers stepped in to help not just me, but apparently everyone else in the room.

Admittedly, this was partially to ensure we could actually get to the end of the session in the limited amount of time we had, it's not that we'd been given an impossible task, but still – don't expect to breeze through without straining a few brain cells here and there. It's hard to overlook how overdone the whole block-pushing thing is, mind you, but the variety in the rest of the demo has me reassured that Planet of Lana 2 has plenty of tricks up its sleeve to keep us engaged.

There was only one tiny point in the demo where things didn't seem to be working quite right. In one specific area, Mui suddenly became rather disobedient, and didn't want to jump onto a ledge no matter how many times I asked. The solution to this was moving slightly further away from the platform in question, which felt slightly clunky, but far from game-breaking. I'm just hoping Mui doesn't go full Trico mode from The Last Guardian and can be a bit more cooperative in the full release, though it is nice when Lana's furry friend displays their own personality.

Personally though, I'm not worried. Everything else was perfectly smooth, and it shouldn't be ignored that the puzzle-platformer is still eyeing up a vague 2026 release, so there's still plenty of time for polish, and I'm very excited to see what else developer Wishfully is cooking up with its sequel.

Want to read more from GamesRadar+'s Autumn Preview? Be sure to head over to our Gamescom 2025 coverage hub.

If Tim Schafer is the face of Double Fine Productions, then you could think of Lee Petty as its spirit. The art director defined the inimitable style of Brutal Legend and Broken Age, and led production on Headlander, Stacking, and RAD – "Next to me, he's the person who made the most Double Fine games," Schafer tells me. So there was little hesitation when Petty approached the studio's founder with his next big idea, in the months following the acquisition into the Xbox Game Studios network in 2019. "We were like," Schafer continues, "'Well, what can we do now that we couldn't do before – now that we have support, resources, and a little more freedom?'"

You need only look at Xbox's 2025 output to see how the acquired studios have wielded these elements. id Software unleashed Doom: The Dark Ages, a shooter with wider combat arenas than ever before; Compulsion Games pursued South of Midnight, an action-adventure with a handcrafted, stop-motion inspired visual style; and Obsidian Entertainment is ready to deliver The Outer Worlds 2, an RPG overflowing with depth and detail. The keywords here are: Bigger, bolder, more ambitious.

Double Fine has purposefully gone in a different direction. Keeper is smaller than the studio's last release, 2021's Psychonauts 2, and far stranger. "Lee and I wanted to get really weird," Schafer laughs. "We wanted to make something that we could probably never have gotten signed and published when we were independent. It's really artistic and it doesn't make sense at first, but it's really engrossing."

That much is clear from the 30 minutes of Keeper I was able to see behind closed doors at Gamescom 2025. What Double Fine is putting forward here is a surreal, third-person adventure game where you take control of a lighthouse. The crumbling structure is awarded sentience after encountering a spirited seabird, the unlikely duo embarking on a journey towards the center of a mysterious island – stumbling towards realms beyond understanding. Keeper is the result of four years of development, time which has clearly been invested into conjuring something as mystifying as it is utterly mesmerizing.

Into the unknown

I'll be honest, it's really difficult explaining these sorts of ethereal adventures. At just six-to-eight hours in length, Double Fine is hesitant to pull the curtain back too far – should it risk revealing too much about this dreamy stage production. There's a story told without a word spoken too, so the studio doesn't want to risk implanting its own perspective on events before players have an opportunity to bring their own to the experience. And because it is so dreamlike in nature, it's difficult for me to really frame what is being put forward either; you're either feeling the vibe or you aren't. Keeper is the sort of video game that Xbox Game Pass was built to house.

So here's what I will say: I was utterly taken aback by Keeper. Verdant visuals invite you into worlds unknown, the camera lingering just above the lantern room as you crawl through verdant meadows and small villages populated by little mechanical creatures. Light puzzle mechanics act as an expansion of the exploration, a counterweight which shifts you between passive observer and active participant in the strangest realm conjured from the Double Fine ether yet.

"There are three major ways that a player can interact with this world," says Schafer. "There's a beam of light that the lighthouse casts into the world, causing things to happen in the environment. There's a focused beam of light, which makes more exciting things happen – specific actions. And one of those actions may be to highlight a perch point, a little spot in the environment where Twig [that's the bird, usually seen perched atop the lighthouse] can land and maybe turn a crank or open a door. Keeper is an adventure game with light puzzles, but it's mostly about atmosphere."

It's an atmosphere I'm keen to immerse myself in come October 17, where Keeper will launch on Xbox Series X, PC, and Game Pass. In the opening moments of Keeper, we see withering tendrils spread and coalesce around a toppled lighthouse, allowing it to sprout legs and follow the siren call of a beacon atop a distant mountain. After just 30 minutes with the game, I feel as if those same tendrils have invaded my psyche, calling me to embark on a similar journey. You should be there with me too.

You simply will not guess the main character of the Psychonauts studio and Brutal Legend art director's new mind-bending adventure

To read articles from the GamesRadar+ Autumn Preview, head on over to our Gamescom 2025 coverage hub.

I can tell you one thing about Is This Seat Taken? for certain: if school exams were as charming as this, they'd have been a lot less frightening. This game from Poti Poti Studio is all about finding the right seats for cute little shapes and solving logic puzzles – all with fantastically designed visuals that make them truly engaging.

You know the type of logic puzzles I mean. Think the cast of Sonic are driving out to the lake for a vacation but Shadow won't sit next to Sonic, but also Knuckles wants to share his ant treats with Shadow. It's the crux of the devious Jindosh lock puzzle in Dishonored 2. Or even sudoku for that matter. They can be especially devious because they ask you to puzzle out, Clue-like, a tight solution by weaving through a whole host of limitations.

Seating plan

Is This Seat Taken? immediately removes the initial stress of having to visualize a logic puzzle in your head or with gridded note paper by presenting each seating dilemma visually on screen with incredibly clear and appealing imagery. Hovering the cursor over each shape tells you more about their desires, and picking them up and plopping them down feels wonderfully responsive to do, from the pop as you place them to the way they dangle as you move across the screen.

What that also means is Is This Seat Taken? has the freedom to add a large variety of situations without becoming overwhelming, and to gradually up the ante over the course of puzzling through each location. Every spot has multiple puzzle steps to complete – for instance, the bus puzzle type unloads passengers at each stop while a fresh batch waits to board.

You then have to reshuffle your placed shapes around to accommodate the new ones, usually with margin for error decreasing with each step. Where you may easily have been able to balance groups who want to chatter with those wanting to snooze or concentrate on reading a book in the bus' first outing, you could end up with even more yappers or nappers who have trouble crossing over by the final bus route – forcing you to rethink your earlier solutions.

Similarly, more and more complications arise, often related to the scenario in question. Within the cinema for instance, some troublemakers may want to use their phone, annoying other shapes. On a boat, some may want to be by the sides to take photos, while others want to be seated in the middle to avoid splashback. A handful of levels allow you to change the environment as well, such as turning air conditioning units on and off – though while some need to be cooled down, others hate the chill. But what if one of each type wants to sit together? Agh!

Everyone deserves a seat at the table as well, meaning that even though I'd personally tell those addicted to their phones to take a hike from my film premier, you have to make sure they're all present and accounted for. Plenty affect the space around them as well, from eating really smelly cheese nachos which may turn the stomach of others at a football game, to simply wearing too much cologne that it can be sniffed for a fair few tiles around them.

Even with the negative effects, dangling a cologne-heavy shape across the map will highlight in blue how far their smell will carry. You always have more than enough information to avoid knowing what's required ever becoming an issue. Similarly, many shapes have little shorthands on their icon to indicate their most important details, like a little speech bubble for the chatty ones, or a sweat icon for those yearning for A/C.

Given how easy it is to drag and drop each shape, no puzzle frustrates for too long, even though some later levels can get quite tricky. Whether it's juggling some characters who explicitly don't want to sit next to each other, or grouping up tables based on food preferences at a wedding, Is This Seat Taken? always feels incredibly responsive.

For the most part, Is This Seat Taken? remains inventive throughout its snappy runtime. Following the journey of Nat, a rhombus who wants to be an actor despite feeling out of place, is reason enough to hop from city to city as you play through each level, scooping up stars for satisfying the soon-to-be-seated – and the lightweight story is heartwarming enough.

Some puzzle types can become a bit repetitive even if different cities have slightly different rules – trains for instance remain fairly similar even if only some incorporate air conditioning. Also, while I appreciate the classroom levels for offering inversions to a lot of rules – for instance here chatter must not be placed together or they'll be too distracted – it feels less engaging to me than leaning into rules. Maybe that's something I need to bring up with my therapist, though.

Still, even including the bonus puzzles unlocked by maxing out each city, I did find myself wanting a bit more variety. As different as some locations maybe be, they often still boil down to dealing with the same core puzzle pieces, and I felt a little bit done with some problems before hitting credits. Even so, collecting all the stars has been a great time, and in terms of visuals and the satisfaction of shuffling pieces into the correct order, Is This Seat Taken? is a marvelously polished puzzle game.

Is This Seat Taken? was reviewed on PC with a code provided by the publisher.

I finally tried Minami Lane after seeing over 5,000 positive reviews, and within 4 hours it's already the chillest management game I've ever played

999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors was one of those Nintendo DS games that, like many on the tiny yet indomitable handheld, changed the trajectory of many a gamer4's lives. With a branching narrative, deadly stakes, and tricky escape room puzzles, it was a combination like little else. There's a reason I consider it one of the best DS games. Which is why I'm so pleased that Team Zero Escape have returned to the escape room format with No Sleep For Kaname Date: From AI: The Somnium Files.

All I knew going into this AI: The Somnium Files spin-off interquel was that it'd be less story heavy and focus more on gameplay, meaning it really took me by surprise to discover within minutes that No Sleep For Kaname Date is basically a homage to the whole Zero Escape series. Given the sub-team's name, Team Zero Escape, it's a return to their roots.

Dream catcher

After the Zero Escape trilogy, many elements were carried across to the AI: The Somnium Files duology anyway. Yet, fully 3D, featuring action scenes, and less grounded thanks to its over-the-top sci-fi action, the games have always felt very much like their own thing. Centering around ABIS, a secret government agency that can investigate crimes by exploring people's subconscious, escape rooms were reimagined as Somniums – lightweight adventure game style sequences that have you juggling a time limit to unravel abstract logic.

Across those first two games, these are used to punctuate investigating fairly static environments and story sequences – both have extremely ambitious narratives that remain some of the most well executed I've ever played. Twists and turns don't do justice to the kind of devices AI: The Somnium Files and its secret pull off. They're more like completely tossed spaghetti.

Yet it all works. Able to juggle some of the silliest and often (very inclusively) downright thirsty humor with cutting emotional peaks, AI: The Somnium Files also understands that sometimes you need to give players release through the medium of full cast musical numbers. There's really nothing else doing it quite like AI: The Somnium Files, except maybe The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (which shares a creator in Kotaro Uchikoshi).

No Sleep For Kaname Date feels like the spin-off it is, but is able to keep most of these vibes intact while gunning for a smaller, less heavy experience. Pushing new escape room sections to the fore (though a handful of Somnium sections are also present as palette cleaners) gives the game its own identity. Events get underway when investigator Kaname Date witnesses his internet idol (and conspiracy theorist) pal Iris get abducted by aliens, which he then somehow forgets about before having to assist in the deadly escape games she's being forced to play over the phone. It's a lot of hand waving but, well, spin-off. Don't sweat it.

Compared to somnium dives, the proper escape rooms here begin with no time limits, feature more intricate puzzles, and even have you swapping between characters as you juggle items and perspectives between them to progress. One great example features a character trapped in a wooden box that's filling up with water (yes, a direct nod to the beginning of 999), finding clues within while having to communicate them to another, who is solving puzzles on the outside of the box.

Most conundrums are delightfully over-complicated in their theming, playing with historical myth, ancient conspiracy theories, and folklore – all while requiring some jumps in logic to work out how to progress. Less obtuse than some of those in Zero Escape, even if by virtue of No Sleep for Kaname Date offering more hints, it hits the same vibes with how it pulls in all sorts of obscure trivia.

One section has you learning about different types of hot springs while also juggling different pH colors. Another is themed around a space museum on an alien planet, forcing you to learn and cross-reference new star constellations and the like. Like the best escape rooms, you can't just zero in on abstracted puzzles, but have to engage with the theme of each room to unravel the mysteries that await. The joy comes from the immersion.

Clued in

No Sleep For Kaname Date only has a handful of escape rooms – this is a shorter game than its predecessors – but each is still quite meaty and well-deployed within the storyline. While the narrative is less in-depth than the other AI: The Somnium Files games, No Sleep for Kaname Date still manages to weave an intriguing sci-fi conspiracy thriller to tie it all together – though at times it feels like it winks to the camera while it hand waves some of its leaps of logic. Getting clues for later escape rooms within some earlier somnium explorations in the game had me genuinely curious about how everything was connected, and it sticks the landing.

It's also nice that the escape rooms, while they have Date on call, spotlight fan favorite characters. While I'm not sure why Iris is suddenly wearing a rabbit suit (it might be related to the new song she's preparing to debut), it's great to get to see more of the world from her perspective as she progresses and meets other returning characters who have also ended up in the game.

Outside of the new escape rooms – which are all very inventively designed – the rest of No Sleep for Kaname Date is, for the most part, very cleverly constructed from parts of the other AI: The Somnium Files games. There are a couple of fresh characters – new Psync System co-ordinator Hina, for example, who's also an escape room fanatic to the point she's been banned from most of the ones in the city for being too good, is a delight.

Otherwise, the very brief investigation sections are mostly an excuse to return to key areas and have a quick chat with the favorite characters from the other two games. As a fan, it's really like visiting old friends – and away from the intense emotional stakes of the other two games, it's great to just hang out with them for a bit. It even includes characters not introduced until the second game despite this being set before it.

No Sleep for Kaname Date feels like a real celebration for both AI: The Somnium Files and the Zero Escape trilogy through and through, while being just meaty enough to avoid feeling throwaway (it even has a brief spoiler test at the beginning, meaning if you don't know what happened in the first game it won't spoil it with any appendix information here).

It even features a host of very silly alternative endings to discover, usually revolving around Date disgracing himself in some way, with bonus unlockable scenes including some in the style of classic visual novels such as Fate/Stay Night or Higurashi – complete with pixelated graphics. I wasn't sure I should expect much from No Sleep for Kaname Date as a smaller release, but it ended up feeling like a homecoming.

No Sleep for Kaname Date: From AI: The Somnium Files was played on Nintendo Switch, with a code provided by the publisher

Want more story instead? Check out our best visual novels!

Before Wordle, there was another Wordle, which changed its creator's life when the other one went viral thanks to people searching the app store.

Wordle is one of those phenomena that you don't get all too often. Outside of something like Candy Crush, Pokemon Go, or Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I can't think of many games that went so viral it felt like you couldn't go a day without hearing about it. Given its popularity with nearly everyone, it's only natural that some who were perhaps a bit less tech savvy would be steered in the wrong direction, which seemed to be the case.

Wordle is a browser game, but for a lot of people hearing about the viral game, their first port of call was the Apple App Store, which is where they found Wordle, but not that one.

Mobile developer Steven Cravotta recalls a story on Twitter about Wordle's popularity. "When I was 17 years old (2016) I built a mobile app called Wordle… it was downloaded about 100k times before I gave up on the project," Cravotta says, adding: "It sat in my Apple developer account, until in 2021 another developer named Josh build a web app game, also called Wordle. Josh's game went viral globally. A lot of people searching for his game went to the App Store and downloaded mine instead."

Apple did take efforts to take down fake Wordle clones trying to take advantage of unsuspecting downloaders, but as Cravotta's game was released half a decade earlier, you can't take away "the OG." Cravotta writes: "Apple wiped out all the competition. I was the only 'Wordle' on the App Store. My little mobile app ended up being downloaded over 10M times in the span of a few weeks. It changed my life forever."

While obviously Cravotta's game is not in this camp, with success like that it's no surprise that you see people release games with similar names to capitalize on the popularity of viral hits. We've seen it recently with the drug dealing sim Schedule 1 which has had similarly named titles appear on both PlayStation and the Switch eShop.

You can find more mobile games to play on our list of the best Android games.

In Camper Van: Make It Home, from developer Malapata Studios, I sink into a relaxing flow and decorate my little house on wheels. After already bringing a smaller camper van to life and travelling to a new destination, I'm now in an upgraded, larger vehicle, and it's pretty clear from the getgo that someone else resides here, too. With various belongings to set down, from toiletries to clothing and kitchenware, I have to fit all my stuff in with what's already here.

At one stage I unpack a mug that's decorated with a happy face and small arms that just so happens to match another on a countertop. To my delight, placing the mug opposite the other makes their arms link up as if in their embrace. At that moment, I realize I'm making a home for a couple. Fast forward to the next destination, and the connecting mug is gone, as is all of the other belongings I was fitting mine around, and I'm stocking up the freezer with tubs of ice cream and placing chocolates on my bed.

It's one of the many ways I'm reminded of Unpacking, with both Camper Van: Make It Home's organizing and environmental storytelling capturing me in much the same way as Witch Beam's pixelated, zen puzzler. But with delightful lo-fi music, beautiful changing backdrops as you move from place to place, and a pet companion, it has its own distinct road trip vibe, too.

Life on the road

You start out with a pretty small camper van, with options to choose its interior and exterior color, as well as which cute little charm you hang off its rear-view mirror (I opt for a happy frog, myself). Then, you're free to start setting down all your belongings, which proves to be quite the puzzle in itself since you have limited space. With a bed that has a pull out compartment that houses shelves and also serves as a fold out table, I sink into the sense of satisfaction it brings me to figure out the perfect spot for every object, from popping stationary in a shallow drawer, to finding a nook for my rolled up socks.

With different symbols on the right-hand side of the screen that mark different kinds of belongings – with a sandwich for food items, or a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste for toiletries, clicking on them will generate different household items in those categories. Once the symbol is completely purple, you know all objects from that section have been placed. Never knowing what item you get with each click adds to the puzzle element, since you might settle something down, only to have to rejig everything when another object would be a better fit for that space.

Just like Unpacking, I love how each item starts to paint a picture of the person who's on this journey. A guitar and polaroid camera? They clearly have a creative streak. Later on, I even squeal with delight when I pull out a Switch game box that I can instantly tell pays homage to Animal Crossing: New Horizons (they're clearly a person of taste, too).

Once all of the items are in place, I'm free to move on to the next destination, and each step of my journey is chronicled in a scrapbook that I can look back on any time. From venturing to a sunsoaked campsite, to a picturesque mountainside, and more, I also love the way the camper evolves throughout; getting bigger, or bringing in some new compartments for me to place objects in.

Alongside the environmental storytelling, I also get such a kick of the interactivity of some of the objects, as well as the camper van interior. While the camera can be a bit clunky to move around at times on PC, it's an absolute joy to click on everything to see if there are hidden interactions – like pulling up a collapsible shower, or snapping a shot with the camera. During my travels, I also get to choose from a cat, corgi, or lizard (all of which are adorable) who becomes a little travelling companion. I decide on the corgi after a lot of deliberation, and yes, I'm happy to report you can absolutely pet them.

Complete with lo-fi music that just brings the whole experience together, the vibes of Camper Van: Make it Home are immaculate. It's quite a short experience, but if you're after a relaxing puzzle game that takes you on a laidback journey and you enjoyed Unpacking, you'll likely love this, too.

Camper Van: Make It Home is out now on PC and is set to come to Switch later this year. To see what else we've been enjoying, head on over to our Indie Spotlight series.

Lumines is probably best remembered as the puzzle banger that defined the PSP launch, and while the series has never been completely dormant, it's been a long time since it had its moment in the sun. That's about to change with Lumines Arise, a synesthetic take on the format from Enhance, the studio behind Tetris Effect.

Lumines Arise follows the same basic format as classic Lumines, where you drop 2x2 blocks across the board and wait for a sweeping timeline bar to kick off your combos. The series always had a big emphasis on the audio-visual experience, but Arise kicks it up another notch.

"We hope Lumines Arise's compelling gameplay, eclectic soundtrack, and lavish visuals will draw you in deep," Takashi Ishihara said during the PlayStation State of Play broadcast, "as you forget your worries, your fears - forget yourself - in a synesthetic sensory wonderland."

"You know, typical puzzle game stuff," Enhance boss Tetsuya Mizuguchi joked.

Mizuguchi himself is credited as the original creator of Lumines at his previous studio, Q Entertainment, but you might also know him for his work on Sega classic Rez, which got a VR port some years back that remains a highlight for that format.

Lumines Arise will be available on PS5, PSVR2, and Steam in the fall, and a demo is coming to give us a taste sometime in the summer. If you want to keep the vibes going in the meantime, the official site has a link to streaming options for the game's soundtrack.

Summer Game Fest hasn't even officially kicked off yet. Check out the full Summer Game Fest schedule 2025 and follow us throughout the next week for more.

Comparing your game to Portal is a bold move, but indie developer Pixel Maniacs seems pretty confident about its upcoming puzzler ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard.

In a recent Reddit post, one of the developers writes, "Valve never made a Portal 2 sequel. So we did." We all know Valve is allergic to threequels, so we've had to make do with Portal 1 and 2, as well as a series of spin-off projects, rather than getting a fully-fledged Portal 3. Portal 2 is one of the best puzzle games in the world, so ChromaGun 2 has some big shoes to fill.

The GIF posted by the developer makes it easy to see why they're comparing their game to Portal. It's an FPS puzzle game where you use a nifty gun to turn objects into various different colors. There's a free demo available on Steam if you want to try it out for yourself. Download it right here.

Valve never made a Portal 2 sequel. So we did. from r/IndieDev

The setting of the game reminds me more of Portal than the gameplay itself, however. You're helping a company test out its new technology, although it seems much more voluntary than Aperture's testing chambers.

The actual puzzle-solving element of ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard reminds me more of Qube and Qube 2 than Portal. It's definitely because of all the colored blocks and the distinct lack of portals, which, if you remember, were an integral part of Portal.

The original ChromaGun came out in 2016 and has 'Mostly Positive' reviews, so this sequel could be something special. Pixel Maniacs has another game if you're not fond of puzzles: Can't Drive This. One player races a monster truck while another builds the track in real-time. It looks chaotic and like great fun if you get a group of friends together to enjoy it with four-player splitscreen.

Or, you can check out all the other upcoming video game release dates of 2025.

Have you ever had that dream where you see another room in your house? Maybe there’s a little door next to the bathroom, a small hatch next to the stairs, or an attic that doesn’t exist. It’s a theme that my not-quite-nightmare dreams hook onto a lot: the dreams aren’t scary, but there’s a certain horror pallor sticking to them like sweat on bedsheets. Blue Prince is perhaps the game that’s ever come closest to reinvigorating those feelings within me as I play it.

In the roguelike puzzle game, you inherit a house from your great uncle. There's one catch – you need to find the hidden 46th room in this 45 room mansion. That in itself, is quite a creepy premise, with the game’s core loop involving opening a door and then drafting (picking from three blueprints) a room beyond it. You may one day turn left from the entrance hall into a closet, another day into a grand dining room, and another into a spare room, all half-dried paint and unfinished dreams.

As I play it, enjoying its brainteasing puzzles, something about it just doesn’t feel right. It makes me uneasy. All of this makes me think of House of Leaves, the seminal postmodern horror story by Mark Z. Danielewski. In this tome-like book, you’ll find a story within a story: The Navidson Record, which follows the titular Will Navison, a photographer who moves into a new home in Virginia with his family. It quickly becomes apparent that there is something altogether more horrifying about the house, which is seemingly alive. It undulates with ever-changing hallways, doors and other fixtures appearing, changing its interior dimensions without ever changing its exterior ones. One of the key centerpoints of the house is a descent down below it into cavernous depths.

Sound familiar? Mt. Holly’s Foundation room is calling your name.

The house always wins

Throughout Blue Prince, I kept half-expecting to run into a monster or some other horror, such is its tone. There’s something undeniably terrifying about the baffling layouts that you’ll find. Perhaps you’ll draft a Great Hall, behind the doors of which you constantly find closets too small to use. Maybe you’ll draft a garage next to a closet, leading from a bedroom. In other games, this would simply be put down as a poor design choice by the environment team, but here it has two creators: you and the house. The house creates itself as much as you do – it's what offers you the choices for each room, after all.

Both of these works blend genres together effortlessly in a way that I’ve only ever seen before in MyHouse.wad, a mod for the original Doom that is directly inspired by House of Leaves. Just as the game isn’t a straightforward puzzle game, the book isn’t a straightforward horror story, either.

House of Leaves can be read not only through countless interpretative lenses, but as entirely different genres. The book appears to be a horror story in both its format and its content, but there’s a lot more to it than that. The main character outside of the Navidson record, for example, lives a chaotic life of meaningless sexual encounters and drug abuse, satirising the vacuousness of gen X life, akin to Fight Club. One of the more popular anti-horror interpretations of the book, however, is of a love story. This love can come from and towards many different characters, but each reading tends to hook onto one in particular.

If House of Leaves, despite its outward appearance, can be a love story, what stops Blue Prince from being a horror game? That, to me, is what sells Blue Prince as the first House of Leaves game, distinct from things like MyHouse.wad, masterful as they are. This capability to read the game as both a puzzle game, abstracted from the spacial horrors within and as a horror game.

Don’t know much trigonometry

There's another aspect of Blue Prince that I think lends itself to the horror label, above and beyond its nonsensical spaces that Kubrick would be proud of. Wandering from room to room, it’s hard to feel totally alone. You are met, at reliable points throughout your trips into Mt. Holly, with hints of inhabitants beyond yourself. Food will be served in the dining room, dishes prepared in the kitchen; you’ll find puzzles reset each day, ready to tempt you.

Despite being totally alone, the house shows signs of life, both its own and of other residents. It’s telling that one of my first points of comparison for Blue Prince was the Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil, and not only because opening doors in both games takes center stage at times. There’s a discomfort and an uncanniness in being somewhere so devoid of life while evidently being redolent with it.

In short, play Blue Prince. It’s a sensational puzzle game, but it’s more than that. As with House of Leaves, it’s a title that is capable of occupying multiple and disparate genres simultaneously. In my dreams, I’ve often wondered what lies beyond the extra doors and hidden spaces. In Blue Prince, like in House of Leaves, you get to find out.

"Get a journal, a pen, and buy the game already": Balatro creator says new puzzle roguelike Blue Prince is "already one of the best games I've ever played"

We're not even half way through 2025 but it's already stacked with possible game of the year contenders between the likes of Monster Hunter Wilds and Split Fiction, and now, out of almost nowhere, a new indie just stormed into the race as the year's best-rated game.

Blue Prince didn't come completely out of the, ahem, blue - the creators of Inscryption and Balatro have been singing its praises and it's even showed up in a few high-profile game showcases here and there. But I think it's fair to say not many people were expecting it to become 2025's best-reviewed game so far.

On Metacritic, the puzzle game has an average score of 93 based on 32 critic reviews, 100% of which are positive, most of which are glowingly so. That means Blue Prince has stolen the crown away from co-op blockbuster Split Fiction and remastered puzzler The Talos Principle Reawakened, which both comes close with a still impressive average rating of 91. Monster Hunter Wilds and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 round out the top five with an 88 metascore.

In case you've never heard of Blue Prince and can't imagine what a 'roguelike puzzler' even is, well, the setup seems pretty unintimidating. You're called to claim your inheritance in a massive manor, but to do so, you need to find the 46th room in the manor that only has 45. So, you need to explore, find secrets, and gather clues across several runs while the layout might change every time.

GamesRadar's Blue Prince review was just as enthusiastic, and said the game "feels truly unique in how it takes a simple premise and fills it with multiple threads of mystery to pull at. This exploration roguelike is like nothing else I've played, and became a puzzle obsession I just couldn't shake across multiple runs where I always felt like I was discovering something new. Even after credits, the mysteries of Mt. Holly continue to surprise me."

Blue Prince is out now on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Game Pass.

Interested? Check out our top Blue Prince starting tips.

Having some Blue Prince tips to hand when you first arrive at Mount Holly will stand you in good stead, as you're about to embark on a unique roguelike puzzle adventure where nothing is quite what it seems and no two journeys are the same. As well as trying to solve the mystery of what's going on in this strange place, you'll also need to get to grips with the mechanics of exploring a shape-shifting mansion, as that is key to making progress while you draft rooms into existence. For some pointers to get you started on the right path, here are 10 essential Blue Prince tips that we've picked up on our travels.

Want to know what we thought of the game? Then check out our Blue Prince review to see why it became a puzzle obsession we just couldn't shake.

1. Plan ahead using the Blueprint Map

You should plan ahead with the blueprint so you can keep moving up the map where possible, and once you've opened the next door to start drafting you can press R2/RT to bring up the Blueprint Map on the side of the screen so you don't need to remember the direction(s) you want to head in. Once the door is opened you have to draft a new room, so be sure you're ready before opening the door.

Also bear in mind that each of the available rooms can only appear once per run, so the more open passages you use early on, the more dead ends that can appear later. Placing a couple of dead ends along one path early in a run can help you get extra supplies, while also increasing your chances of being able to proceed forward on a different path.

2. You can't always rely on the draft floorplans

While checking which exits are marked on a draft floorplan can help you plan your next steps, they can't always be relied on to actually be usable every time as they may be locked or security doors – but you won't know that until you draft. The only exception to this is certain hallways, which will be marked to say they are always left unlocked, so if you definitely need to move forward then use one of those if you can. Be aware that you'll find that locked doors become more common at higher ranks in the mansion, and that any floorplan exits that butt up against existing walls will be automatically sealed off when drafted.

3. Don't stress when running up against dead ends

In the earlier stages of exploration, you're much more likely to end a run by becoming surrounded by dead ends and not being able to progress further into the estate, having to call it quits before running out of steps. While this can feel like you’ve made a mistake, it's often impossible to avoid because you've ended up drafting an unfavorable selection of rooms or locked doors have appeared to block your way. Don't be disheartened, as hopefully you've made some new discoveries on the run that will benefit you in the future.

4. Make the best of a bad situation

If you are in the situation where none of the rooms you can draft will take you further into the mansion, look to draft the room that will provide you with additional items, or a room you haven't had before to expand your directory and potentially reveal more clues. If this is to be the last room you can draft on the run due to cumulative dead ends, prioritize a room you haven't used before if possible as the extra items won't help you and can't carry over to the next run.

5. You can (sort of) sprint to get around quicker

You'll be spending a lot of time walking back and forth around the mansion and surrounding grounds, so if you're finding the whole thing a bit slow then there is a way to move faster. While it's not quite sprinting, there is a 'Stroll' button assigned to L2/LT that can be used to get going considerably quicker. You can either hold this to walk faster until you release it, or tap it to increase your pace permanently until you tap it again, even if you stop and start multiple times.

6. Don't backtrack too much as your Blueprint Map expands

There will be plenty of times when you need to backtrack through the rooms you've already drafted, either because you've run into a dead end or you need to go and interact with something in a previous location – a good example is the Blue Prince garage, which you can only open by interacting with the breaker box in the Utility Closet. Be careful not to wander around aimlessly though, as every room you enter uses up a step and gets you closer to being forced to call it quits – this also applies to different sections of the outside area, so keep an eye on that step count. Plan your route and make sure you're going somewhere with a purpose, so you're not burning through steps unnecessarily.

7. Check room descriptions so you don't miss items

Rooms can contain gems, keys, and coins, as well as useful items, but these will be noted on the floorplan for that particular room. This means you can use that information to grab everything available in the room and ensure that you haven't missed anything, but it's still worth searching around the place before you move on as you can also find consumables to increase your step count and clues to read that may assist you later on.

8. Get into the Security room if you can

Security is one of the most important rooms to unlock, as the terminal within lets you adjust the likelihood of keycard doors appearing to block your path – on the other hand, if you do find a keycard then you can use the security terminal to increase the likelihood of keycard doors appearing, which you'll easily be able to get through.

The terminal also lets you check the estate’s inventory while you're there. This inventory reveals if you’ve missed any useful items, such as the shovel, running shoes, or fruit, which aren’t noted on floorplans and can be very easy to miss. While the inventory doesn’t tell you which room the item is in, you’ll at least know that there’s one lying around and you can search for it accordingly.

9. Make sure you're taking notes

If you want to solve the mystery of the manor and finally reach that elusive Room 46, you'll need to be vigilant and you're going to have to take notes. Either get a notebook or grab your phone and write down clues as you go, as information you discover while exploring can’t be stored and accessed through the game but it may prove useful later on. Obviously information like the Blue Prince Boudoir safe code or how to solve the Blue Prince Billiard room dartboard puzzles are essential to record, but even noting down things like the paintings on the walls could pay off in the long run.

10. Finish your current run to save

Saving and exiting the game will end your current run by calling it quits, so it's always best to finish your current run first then choose the save and exit option on the summary screen. If you do need to take a break mid-run then you can put your console into rest mode, but be aware that if the game closes or updates automatically then you could lose that day’s progress.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Opening the Blue Prince garage is very useful as it unlocks the West Gate Path permanently, letting you access new outer rooms. However, to do so, you also need access to the Utility Closet (breaker room), as the deactivated electronic door button on the garage means you can’t get out. As well as being an exit to the estate grounds, the garage also has a couple of other opportunities for item gathering and resources. This all means the garage in Blue Prince is a deceptively complicated room, so I’ve explained everything about it below.

How to open the garage door in Blue Prince

Opening the garage door is quite simple but requires you to have already drafted the Utility Closet or you need to hope you draft it later in your run. With the garage door open, you can then open the West Gate, so here’s how to do both:

1. Head to the utility closet and flip the garage switch on the breaker control panel to “ON”.
2. Go back to the garage and press the black garage door button immediately on the left to open the garage door.

3. Walk down the drive then turn left and go down the path. Cross over the stream and continue forward, bearing left.
4. Unlock the West Gate that leads back to the grounds in front of the mansion.

You’ve now permanently unlocked the western part of the estate grounds. When you start a run, you can head outside and go through the gate you unlocked to reach an outer room, which could be a Hovel, Shelter, Toolshed, or Trading Post, among other options. All of these rooms provide a convenient early bonus for the run ahead, so it’s well worth drafting one before you begin searching the estate properly. However, the plank that goes over the stream is not in place at the start of the run, so you can’t use it as a shortcut to enter the mansion from the west wing.

Importantly, the garage also has two opportunities for loot:

• 3 Keys: Turn right as soon as you enter the garage to spot three keys hanging on hooks on the wall. You can use these to unlock doors and chests.
• Car storage box: This box on the back of the old car can only be opened using Car Keys, but it will contain a useful item inside that will help on your run.

It’s worth drafting the garage in Blue Prince for the above rewards, but bear in mind that it’s exclusive to the west wing of the estate, so that means you need explore along the leftmost column if you want to have the best chances of drafting it – it’s also classed as "unusual" rarity, so it’s one of the rarer rooms.

If you need even more keys, the Blue Prince Billiard room puzzle might be able to help you out, but if it’s gems you’re after, solving the Blue Prince Boudoir safe might lead to what you need.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

The Blue Prince Boudoir safe is likely to be one of the first locked vaults you come across on your runs, requiring a four digit code to get it open. The safe itself is actually quite easy to overlook if you aren't exploring rooms thoroughly, as it's tucked in the corner behind a tall mirror, but once you spot it you still need to find the combination and it isn't written down anywhere. The answer is there with you in the room, but you'll need to think laterally in order to work it out, so here's how to get the Boudoir safe code in Blue Prince.

Where to find the Blue Prince Boudoir safe code

As with many of the puzzles in the game, the Blue Prince Boudoir safe code is revealed by searching for clues found within the room, but you'll need to think outside the box to get it as it isn't written down as actual numbers. Look on the dressing table, and you'll find a photograph attached to the mirror you can interact with for a closer inspection. This reveals a Christmas scene, and on the right hand side of the picture you can see a partially unwrapped safe.

So, how does this help with finding the Boudoir safe code in Blue Prince? Well, there's traditionally only one day of the year when you unwrap Christmas presents, and that's December 25. Convert that date into a four digit code and (depending on which country you're from) you'll get one of the following:

• 1225
• 2512

Either of those Blue Prince Boudoir safe codes will work, so enter 1225 or 2512 to open the vault. Inside you'll find a gem, along with a letter in a red envelope to fill in more of the backstory. Make some notes, as the information may be useful later.

If you're finding a different challenge tricky, then here's how to solve the Blue Prince Billiard room dartboard puzzle every time using math, and we also have a set of essential Blue Prince tips to help you start on the right foot.

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The Blue Prince billiard room puzzle will give you keys as a reward, but only if you can solve the math problems that use colored segments on a dartboard instead of the usual symbols. Thankfully, you don’t need to know anything about darts to complete the puzzle, but it’s still not easy to figure out what’s going on with the segments and colors the first time you draft this room. However, once you know how it works, you can solve any version of this dartboard puzzle, so I’ve explained how the billiard room in the Blue Prince works below.

Blue Prince billiard room puzzle solution

To complete any billiard room puzzle in Blue Prince, you need to solve several simple math problems using the colored segments on the dartboard to get numbers from 1 to 20, forming a code – complete enough of these problems and enter the correct numbers on the dartboard to reveal a prize. Note that the code is different every time you draft the billiard room in Blue Prince too, so there’s no way to get around these puzzles without doing some math.

The key to solving the math problems is knowing that the order of operations starts with segments closest to the bullseye and ends with those on the edge of the dartboard, and figuring out what each of the colored segments mean:

• Blue = Addition (+)
• Yellow = Subtraction (-)
• Pink = Multiplication (x)
• Purple = Division (÷)

So, for example, if the dartboard has just two blue segments for 8 and 4, you add them together to get 12 and then select 12 on the board, which will activate a new set of colored segments. Let’s say those segments are, from bullseye to board edge, blue for 20, pink for 2, and purple for 2, 4, and 5. Start with 20, multiply it by 2 and divide by 2 to end up back at 20. Divide that by 5 to get 4, then divide that by 4 to get 1 – note that you could have completed those divisions in any order to get the same result. Select 1 on the dartboard to proceed to the next set of colored segments and so on, until the dartboard lifts to reveal your prize.

Prizes from the Blue Prince dartboard puzzle are usually keys: either a pair of basic keys for unlocking rooms and chests, a keycard for electronic security doors, or a silver key, which can get you access to a room with many doors. If you get a number wrong while entering the dartboard code, you’ll just have to start inputting the code from the beginning and thankfully aren’t locked out of solving it and any rewards behind the dartboard. It’s also worth checking the bar in case there’s a coin lying around!

There are plenty of other puzzles like this, such as the Blue Prince Boudoir safe code, but if you need more general help then we also have some Blue Prince tips to get you started!

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Indie puzzle roguelike Blue Prince has landed to some astoundingly positive reviews, and you can count Balatro creator LocalThunk among the many singing its praises.

"Blue Prince is already one of the best games I've ever played and I still feel like I’m scratching the surface," LocalThunk says in a Bluesky post. "Released today but lucky me I've been playing it all week (perks of the job). Get a journal, a pen, and buy the game already."

A few days earlier, when the review embargo first dropped, LocalThunk predicted that "Blue Prince will get a GOTY nomination at TGA," and given the critical response it's certainly looking likely. Blue Prince's Metacritic score is a whopping 92, making it the top-rated game of the year ahead of Split Fiction, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Monster Hunter Wilds. Our own glowing four-star Blue Prince review is among the game's lower marks.

It's certainly not unheard of for indie titles to secure game of the year nominations at The Game Awards, but the field is typically dominated by AAA affairs. One notable exception came last year, when Balatro itself was up for the big award. LocalThunk has repeatedly chosen to share the GOTY love and shine spotlight on other indie devs, and Blue Prince is no exception.

Blue Prince is a first-person puzzle game about arranging a shifting set of rooms in a mysterious mansion. The game's drawn repeated comparisons to the stone-cold banger Outer Wilds, and it seems much of its depth is waiting to be discovered below the surface. LocalThunk is not alone in recommending you keep a pen and paper at the ready for this one, and it seems that kind of investment is going to be rewarded with something special.

These are the best games of 2025 so far.

While legendary puzzle game Tetris was created by Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov, it spread around the world largely thanks to the efforts of Henk Rogers of Bullet-Proof Software. Through a complicated series of negotiations with Russian authorities in the late '80s – which are now the subject of a feature film – Rogers secured the rights that led to the iconic Game Boy and NES versions of Tetris from Nintendo. That seems to be part of why he was "pissed off" when Nintendo made its own clone of the puzzle game in Dr. Mario.

Rogers tells PC Gamer he was "good friends" with Game Boy designer Gunpei Yokoi since, after all, "I helped him launch Game Boy and he helped me launch Tetris. So that was a mutual thing. But I was a little bit miffed when Nintendo tried to come up with a game to beat Tetris."

That game was Dr. Mario, whose development was led by Yokoi. It's a falling block puzzle game, similar to Tetris, but instead of fitting together oddly-shaped pieces to clear lines, you're matching colored pills to eliminate little virus creatures. It's a quality puzzle game that sold well and spawned numerous sequels, but Rogers is correct in suggesting that, well, it ain't Tetris.

Rogers says the instruction to create Dr. Mario as a competitor to Tetris came from late Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi, who "tried to buy Tetris" outright. "I said no, like 'OK, I'll trade Mario for Tetris. ' Meaning sort of over my dead body. And then Mr Yamauchi gave instructions [to his team], 'you go make a game that's as good as Tetris' and, you know, blah blah blah. Dr Mario is sort of a blatant attempt at making another Tetris. And it's not as good."

He laughs about the situation today, but Rogers says he "was pissed off" at the time. "And I can't really blame Yokoi for that! I mean, I don't know whether it's under him or under another team, whatever, but yeah: that's business."

Rogers went on to co-found The Tetris Company alongside Pajitnov, which handles licensing for every version of Tetris released to this day. The company says Tetris has sold over 520 million units over its long life, so I'd say he got the last laugh in the end.

Tetris tops our list of the best Game Boy games ever made, and there's an argument to be made that it's the best game on every single platform it's appeared on.

Indie puzzle platformer Once Upon a Puppet puts a theatrical twist on some iconic indie side-scrollers.

Once Upon a Puppet puts you in control of two different characters. Nieve is a talented Weaver, but is beset by self-doubt. With her glove, she wields control over the naive but ambitious Drev, a marionette puppet magically bound to her. The thread that links the two is a key part of Once Upon a Puppet's gameplay, allowing players to manipulate the environment, interacting with props and traversing hidden pathways as Drev and Nieve strive to reclaim their theatre from its heartbroken King.

A 2.5D backdrop brings that theatre to life, with shifting sets and a cast of dozens of characters. Some of those will be friendly, but several others won't - as Nieve and Drev continue on their journey, they'll face plenty of villainous foes who are trying to bring the curtain down early. To thwart them, our pair of heroes will have to rearrange the theatre around them, moving props, backdrops, and characters - and even adjusting the stage between the past and the present - to ensure that the show goes on.

Despite the lights of the theatre, there's a dark, gloomy vibe to Once Upon a Puppet, in keeping with some of the most acclaimed indie side-scrollers of the last few years, with a stylization and attention to detail that brings its world to life. But despite that darkness, the entire story is underwritten by a beautiful, atmospheric soundtrack, and the relationship between Nieve and Drev is one that tells a story of friendship and redemption.

If you're a fan of puzzle platformers with beautiful graphics and a lot of heart, you'll definitely want to keep an eye out for Once Upon a Puppet when it launches April 23rd on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam, where you can wishlist it right now ahead of release, or play the demo that's available right now.

Hello Games is best known for its massively ambitious games about exploration thanks to No Man’s Sky, and that game has been constantly updated over the years to the point where it’s now so good that you forget how much of a disaster the launch was. The studio’s upcoming game Light No Fire looks to be just as overwhelmingly massive, with its reveal at The Game Awards 2023 giving serious No Man’s Sky reveal trailer vibes. However, for those looking for a nice compact adventure, Hello Games actually released one in between all of this, which just so happens to be one of the steepest discounts in the Steam Spring Sale.

The Last Campfire is a delightful little puzzle game released back in 2020 and follows a lost soul named Ember helping out other soul creatures to find their purpose in death – almost like a Spiritfarer (which was released nine days before it), but less emotionally devastating. The game was developed by a small team within Hello Games made up of former Frontier Developments staff who worked on the 2008 WiiWare title LostWinds, so if you remember that, you’ll have a good idea of the vibes on show in The Last Campfire.

While there’s a metric ton of games on sale for under $5 right now, you’ll be able to pick up The Last Campfire on Steam for less than $2, with it currently going for $1.49 / £1.27 / AU$2.19 in the Steam Spring Sale 2025. It wont conjure the same feelings as a massive procedurally generated open-world game, but you can drag yourself away from those for a cute 6-hour puzzle adventure, can’t you?

Another highlight in the Steam Spring Sale 2025 is the Hideo Kojima-produced mech banger Zone of the Enders: The Second Runner Mars, which is going for less than $6 right now.

Sony's Japan Studio was responsible for many of PlayStation's most beloved cult favorites, including the likes of Shadow of the Colossus, Gravity Rush, Ape Escape, and LocoRoco. The studio was dissolved in 2021, and while its spirit lives on in Astro Bot developer Team Asobi, the gaming world remains a bit darker with the loss of that creative spark – and a newly unearthed pitch for a PSP game called Stamp has me mourning Japan Studio all over again.

Pitch materials for Stamp dated to November 2009 were recently uploaded to the Internet Archive courtesy of the preservationists at Obscure Gamers. The game never got made, but Japan Studio got at least as far as building a prototype to provide the footage for the trailer you see below.

Stamp would've been a 2D platformer with a papercraft aesthetic where you'd have a creative ability – a stamp – tied to each of the PSP's four face buttons. Square would create boxes you could chain together to create bridges or stairs. Circle would create a bouncy surface you could use to jump or reflect projectiles. You'd be able to kick triangles out to destroy bad guys. Finally, X would delete whatever stamps you'd previously thrown down.

The player character would be part of the "Stamp Bug Family" – a roster of little ladybug-looking folks that each have special abilities, like dropping giant squares or creating floating circles to chain for midair mobility. These characters have a great deal of charm, and I'm utterly obsessed with a slide showcasing hero Stampie's family values by displaying him dragging a laptop-obsessed dalmatian – spotted with PlayStation icons, of course – out for a walk.

There's a lot of dry business details in here, projecting the game's potential sales versus marketing budget, but one key detail the devs cite in Stamp's favor is the success of other "kawaii taste" games, including PaRappa the Rapper, LittleBigPlanet, and Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver. Still, that wasn't enough to convince the bosses that Stamp needed to get made.

Stamp feels very much of a piece with Japan Studio's other beloved portable games, like Patapon and LocoRoco – simple, cute, full of creative ideas, and still some of the best PSP games ever made. Whether it would've been a similarly beloved classic is impossible to say, but this old pitch has me more than sold.

Former PlayStation boss says Japan Studio's closure "wasn't necessarily" surprising: "When a studio hasn't had a hit for a while, then they forget how that feels."

Almost eight years since its last totally new game, Katamari Damacy is back with a fresh installment, but there's an unfortunate catch – it's been banished to Apple Arcade jail for the foreseeable future.

Revealed today, Katamari Damacy Rolling LIVE is bringing back the beloved, classic gameplay consisting of "roll katamari into objects, create increasingly massive orb" that everyone has loved for over 20 years, except this time there's a modern twist, with the focus being on building the King of All Cosmos's livestreaming career. No, really – an Apple blog post announcing the game reveals that creating stars from rolled up stuff will "energize" his streams. It adds: "As users advance, comments from in-game fans appear, and the longer they play, the larger their audience grows."

You can see this in action in the screenshots on its App Store page – TikTok-esque comments appear down the right side of the screen as you play, which say everything from "roll up more plz" to "I stan the King" and "why was this in my recommendations?" It's very silly, but I honestly love it – the fact that we've been waiting so long for a new game makes it all the more exciting, too. It was late 2017 when the last totally new game – the endless runner mobile title Amazing Katamari Damacy – released worldwide, and since then, we've only had a couple of remasters. However, this all makes the fact that Rolling LIVE is an Apple Arcade exclusive all the more unfortunate.

Apple Arcade subscribers across Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV will be able to play Katamari Damacy Rolling LIVE when it launches on April 3, but those on other platforms are all out of luck. With that being said, not all hope is lost. After all, Hello Kitty Island Adventure launched as an Apple Arcade exclusive in 2023 before it eventually made its way to Switch and PC earlier this year (and the lives of Sanrio fans everywhere are much better for it). With that in mind, hopefully the new Katamari game might just be taking a temporary pit stop here before rolling onto different platforms in the future.

Be sure to keep up with everything releasing this year and beyond in our roundup of new games.

Okay, so these two kids want to sit next to each other, and also have a nap. But these other two want to have a loud chat. So they can't be near the kids or they'll wake up. But also I can't move the chatterboxes back there because that person skipped showering and one of those in the conversation really doesn't like bad smells. I could shift them across the aisle but, gah, then they'd be next to someone else who really wants to ride this bus alone while peering out the window. So it goes in Is This Seat Taken?, a logic puzzle game that's taxing and chill in equal measure.

From Poti Poti Studio (and published by Wholesome Games Presents), I've been playing the really lovely and generous Steam Next Fest demo that had me working my way through multiple modes of transportation, a cinema screening, a dine-in disco, and even a wedding reception, encompassing the Barcelona-set chapter of the game. I knew going in I loved the art style, with its monochromatic colors, chunky text, and people who are emotive literal shapes. But I didn't expect to get so hooked on listening to each shape's requests and puzzling out where to place them to get max stars. This is one of the best puzzle games I've played all year, and I can't wait for more.

Sit a while

At the start of each level you're presented with a location-based situation, and sometimes a little bit of narrative set-up to go along with it. You see, these shapes aren't completely abstract. Some characters re-occur, and you follow them between moments – one standout throughout my demo being an aspiring actor who feels like their shape just isn't fit for the silver screen. It's actually a bit touching, and not what I was expecting from a logic puzzler, but I love it.

With all the characters clumped up, you mouse over to see their requests, and then simply drag and drop them into place, able to rearrange as you please before you submit your result, each one you make happy earning you a star. It's easy enough to tell if they're satisfied thanks to those canny emotive designs, as they'll slump over sad if it's wrong, a speech bubble often reminding you what they're upset about; or have a big grin plastered on their mug if they're liking where they're sitting. Each request is often quite simple, ranging from wanting to be next to someone in particular, having a window seat, not sitting somewhere dirty, and the like.

The trick comes from trying to fulfil them all at once, and shapes who will begin to have multiple requests. Some levels turn the dial up over time, having multiple checkpoints where some shapes will leave and some will stay, getting more complex to complete until the very end. As the disco progresses, for example, more shapes want to get onto the dance floor, leaving me juggling who wants to and doesn't want to be close to the band's loudspeakers, and tactically shunting around those with heavy cologne and those who can't stand it. That's because some shapes will alter the seats around them whether you like it or not, from smells to just wearing a big hat (a no-no for the cinema, so anyone behind them will end up fuming).

Some are just tough one-and-doners, the wedding reception being a particularly devious beast (as a bonus level, it's no wonder). A matrimonial powder keg, tensions are high as some people refuse to sit next to others, and yearn for certain foods that are being served in limited supply only. I'm not sure how much wriggle room this particular challenge has, as I end up having to completely de-seat a table before situating them elsewhere, one feud between two shapes requiring them to sit as far away from each other on the same table as possible lest things kick off. So far, this is a joyous puzzler that requires just the right amount of thinking while also being immaculately chill – this is like having your temples massaged by an expert. Sweet release.

Is This Seat Taken is coming to PC at a future date.

Want to give your brain over to pure chaos instead? Moves of the Diamond Hand has you covered: This weird Steam Next Fest RPG might have more dice rolls than Baldur's Gate 3, and so far I've debated a talking fish, uncovered a clone plot, and gone head-to-head with bubble tea

A good demo can do wonders and Mindwave's taste test was so good, it prompted thousands of excited players to donate 11 times its initial crowdfunding goal.

Anyone that's played WarioWare will be somewhat familiar with Mindwave's almost overwhelming, reflex-testing structure. It's a rapid-fire microgame collection that'll move almost too fast even for people with a shrinking attention span, asking you to dial numbers into a flip phone and then stitch together a teddy bear and then pop bubble wrap paper back-to-back-to-back at lightning speeds.

But Mindwave sets itself apart from Nintendo's icon with a gorgeous comic strip art style, a much weirder, gloomier world, and a more detailed story.

Here, you play as Pandora - a girl in a futuristic city where you can jack USBs into a neural slot stuck on your neck. She's won a golden ticket that lets her enter the hulking MindScape tower, which invites countless youngsters to compete against each other in microgames that take place in the contestants' psychic realms with a slim chance to win a big cash prize. It's a slightly uncomfortable setup, but I like how the Psychonauts-style mind-jumping opens the door to more cohesive microgame collections with distinct themes or motifs. (The first has a big focus on cutesy, Y2K stuff, for example.)

In between floors, you can take a minute to talk to the other contestants and some branching conversations go surprisingly deep. I really didn't expect a WarioWare-like with this much character or dialogue, but it works so well.

Last month's demo has already amassed over 4,000 'Overwhelmingly Positive' reviews on Steam, most of which praise its effortless style, focus on fun, and how it sidesteps the genre's biggest pitfall: convoluted controls. Each microgame lays out whether you'll need to use the mouse, the arrow keys, the space bar, the entire damn keyboard, or a mix before it starts, which helps keep things simple.

With so much praise, it's no surprise, then, that Mindwave's Kickstarter campaign smashed its initial $40,000 funding goal by 1100% and has since raised over $443,000. Backers unlocked various stretch goals, so the full game will now also include a 1v1 online mode, an extra mind, post-launch DLC, support for mods, and gamepad support, which might open the door for console ports further down the road.

Developer Holohammer guesses that Mindwave might release on PC in September, 2027, "but because game development is crazy and unpredictable, this is very much subject to change! Don't be surprised if it releases later... or earlier? We don't know."

Mindwave might be years away so why not occupy the wait with the upcoming indies of 2025 and beyond?

While Waiting is a video game you play by and while waiting. That might sound simple and straightforward, but the charming puzzle game from developer Optillusion is only simple and straightforward on the surface. While you absolutely can just… wait, every scene is actually full of delightful secrets and Easter eggs to uncover, which range from simple and straightforward to wildly complex and shockingly convoluted. I should be clear: I mean that as a compliment.

There's really no easy comparison to better understand the concept of While Waiting, but the closest I've come when talking about it with others is taking the general vibe of Untitled Goose Game and applying it to killing time. You don't really have to do anything, and in fact the game will largely move forward entirely without any input from you at all, and any behavior beyond that is arguably completely unnecessary.

Killing time

Not that I would actually recommend doing nothing at all; it's merely an option the game technically supports. The real goodness, the nougat at the center of While Waiting, is everything that it technically allows you to do, well, while waiting. The game is mechanically a series of vignettes or scenes with timers that range in length (and generally are not known to the player) with the only stated goal being to wait until something happens. Wait until someone texts back, wait to fall asleep, wait for class to end. But just outside the confines of all of these are a wide variety of shenanigans in which to partake.

Exactly how to accomplish these shenanigans is hinted at in two ways. A little notebook has a brief description of what you could possibly also do in addition to nothing at all, and a series of stickers in the upper right of the screen has some visual clues. If you successfully achieve whatever secondary objective, boom, you get the sticker in your notebook. Each scene ranges in just how many of these extracurricular activities exist as well as how involved they all are, which is honestly part of the appeal.

Highlighting all of the ways that While Waiting can surprise and delight would ruin it somewhat, or at the very least dim the sheen, but it does feel worthwhile just to give some idea of the range. These extra objectives and opportunities can be trying and failing to squeeze between two people on a bench. Simple enough. Or, as just one example, it can be rolling a shishkabob along an unevenly lit grill, trying to get it cooked on both sides, without burning it in a sokoban-like puzzle of back and forth turning and dragging. I literally had nightmares about that one, I kid you not.

Time enough

But even when those little puzzles turn out to be big puzzles and the easy solve becomes much, much more involved, While Waiting doesn't take itself particularly seriously. Yes, these can be significant logic puzzles, but you can also just leave that all behind to slowly (and sometimes very slowly) wait for the next scene to roll around. You only have to engage with what engages you, and if the part where digging in a drawer suddenly becomes a Tetris-like minigame isn't your speed, well, you can just move on instead.

While Waiting might, at first blush, seem like a gimmick. The whole game is about waiting, the worst part of most video games. But the puzzle game does the impossible and actually makes the act of waiting around for something to happen fun. Beyond the puzzles and activities and charmingly minimalist art design, there's really nothing extra to the video game… except a dedicated button for bringing up and playing with a fidget toy of some kind. You know, to help keep you engaged while waiting.

While Waiting is out now on Nintendo Switch and PC. To see what other indie gems we've been enjoying so far, be sure to check out our Indie Spotlight series.

Jigsaw puzzles just don't quite do it for me. I see the appeal of piecing together a bigger picture, like Lego, but when the number of pieces is in the hundreds or even thousands and there are no instructions, I think I'd rather step on Lego. I recently watched my parents finish a 1,000-piece puzzle of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights – an utterly bizarre triptych with so much color and detail across its three panels that the puzzle pieces almost gave me a headache.

Wilmot Works It Out has some odd-looking jigsaw puzzles that test your grey matter too, but it's nowhere near as intimidating or stressful as solving a thousand-piecer (I assume that's what jigsaw puzzlers call them). In Hollow Pond and publisher Finji's latest title, you play as cheery white square Wilmot and he's part of what may be the worst puzzle club ever because it always mixes pieces from multiple jigsaws in each weekly delivery. This sounds nightmarishly irritating, but it's actually what makes Wilmot Works It Out so compelling and got me into a puzzle flow state.

Join the club

The game is split into eight levels, known as seasons, which see Wilmot receiving puzzle club deliveries every so often from chirpy postwoman, Sam. Each delivery, which you usually get after solving a puzzle and hanging it on the wall, provides a varying number of tile pieces to dump into Wilmot's front room and then it's up to you to continue solving until there are no more for the season.

With the first delivery, you'll learn about the puzzle club's disorganization, where some pieces are so different they stick out like a sore thumb, clearly part of another jigsaw. You'll quickly get to a point where Sam's deliveries have really stacked up, leaving you surrounded by the disparate pieces of three or four puzzles. This forces you into a sort of organization metagame, where you need to divide the front room into imaginary sectors to ensure you don't mix puzzles and make things more confusing with each delivery.

Keeping things orderly becomes much tougher when you discover that, as the puzzles get bigger, the chances of their tiles being more varied in style, color, and pattern increases. That means you'll start grouping tiles into what seem like different puzzles, only to realize later with one crucial piece that they're all part of the same masterpiece.

However, the game's final trick of throwing in tiles with near identical patterns that are actually for completely different puzzles is truly devious. One puzzle features a dinosaur with an orange dot pattern and dark-purple foliage, but those same features appear in another puzzle where the orange dots are clouds in the sky. It sounds frustrating, but the tile pieces can be easily shoved around by Wilmot to find the right place. That means it's easy to experiment and slide individual tiles or even massive clusters around to see what fits, and it's mightily satisfying when you eventually figure out the trick and complete a puzzle that you can hang proudly.

All these design tricks come together to make Wilmot Works It Out highly engaging, even if you're not into jigsaws. Despite the simplicity of some of the final works, the puzzles aren't insultingly easy, and the small piece counts and ease of experimenting means they aren't tediously difficult either. There's a nice challenge in trying to figure out what a completed puzzle is going to look like when it's done so that you can manage the limited space and the tiles within. And when you hit a roadblock, in Metroidvania fashion, you can try looking somewhere else to make progress.

That constant switching between puzzles is what kept me hooked on Wilmot Works It Out, too. I'd start a season, quickly solving the first few puzzles, but inevitably tiles would pile up. Then, while moving things around, I might suddenly notice one tile that'd be a perfect fit, which would cascade into more correct tiles and solved puzzles until I was done with the season - in what felt like minutes but had actually been almost an hour.

Once I wrapped up the game in about six and a half hours, I was presented with marathon mode, where you're given every puzzle piece at once and must solve them all. Tempting though it was, it reminded me far too much of the jumbled mess of real jigsaw puzzles. So, while Wilmot Works It Out has hardly converted me when it comes to jigsaws, it was a charming and extremely pleasant change of pace, and a surprisingly inventive little game that had me hooked over its short run time. Sorry, Ravensburger. You're not getting my money just yet.

Wilmot Works It Out is out now on PC. For more recommendations, be sure to head over to our Indie Spotlight series.

2024 was a standout year for indie gaming, and with some particular creative and unique games getting their flowers, one such game from a solo developer is only going from strength to strength as it passes an estimated $1 million in sales. 

The Operator is a detective game that sees you using various investigative software to dig up clues and help solve crimes. From French solo developer Bastien Giafferi, the game was released in July 2024 and almost immediately garnered a following, racking up around 50 thousand sales in the first month alone. 

While those figures are undoubtedly impressive, especially for a game that fills such a specific niche, the game's quality has clearly become common knowledge, as sales have only continued to rise over time. Gamalytic estimates that the game has now sold nearly 110 thousand copies, while VG Insights put that number at closer to 160 thousand. This puts The Operator's revenue at anywhere from $1.2 million to $1.6 million - a tremendous achievement for a solo developer.

The game has also received some award buzz, being in the running for five categories at the Pégases Awards, a ceremony celebrating the French video game industry, including both best indie game and best game. 

It's one of many indie success stories of 2024 that have been rewarded for taking such a creative approach, such as the beautifully designed point-and-click adventure Phoenix Springs, horror gardening game Grunn, or of course, indie behemoth Balatro. As more players choose to look beyond the comparatively expensive world of AAA and immerse themselves in the indie space, it's unique and creative games like The Operator that will continue to reap the rewards.

If you're interested in other unique titles, check out our list of upcoming indie games for 2025.

The latest round of Nintendo Switch Online games has been revealed, and Fatal Fury 2, Super Ninja Boy, and Sutte Hakkun are joining the SNES library. While those titles might not have topped too many wishlists for the service, I am absolutely delighted that Nintendo's tossing a bone to the retro gaming sickos.

Fatal Fury 2 is certainly the most well-known of the games on this list, as the second entry in a long-running fighting game series that's about to get a new sequel later this year. These days, you'd probably prefer to play the original Neo Geo arcade version of Fatal Fury 2 rather than this SNES home port, but, either way, it's notable for introducing the world to Mai Shiranui.

Super Ninja Boy is a bit of an odd duck, it looks, at a glance, like a traditional JRPG with a top-down perspective and random battles, but once you enter combat the game turns into a real-time beat-em-up. This is an entry in the surprisingly prolific Super Chinese series, originally loosely based on the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West, though this localized version obviously muddies the game's setting.

But the real highlight of this lineup is Sutte Hakkun, an obscure puzzle game published by Nintendo exclusively in Japan. The game was originally released via the Satellaview, a modem accessory for the Super Famicom that let players download games via satellite broadcast. These days, the Satellaview is best known for its role in distributing a handful of obscure Zelda titles, but it also saw the publication of numerous original games.

Sutte Hakkun was among the best-loved Satellaview titles by those who originally made use of the service. It's a puzzle platformer where you play as a birdlike little guy with a needle beak able to absorb blocks as liquid and spit them out where you want. The game quickly developed a cult following after its original release, garnering multiple Satellaview follow-ups and the eventual cartridge release which the Switch Online version appears to be based on.

Like yeah, sure, it's nice that Nintendo Switch Online has given us a convenient way to play the old Mario Party games, but personally I'm far more interested in whatever obscurities Nintendo is willing to drag out of the deepest part of the vault. Give me the Iggy's Reckin' Balls and the Wrecking Crew '98s of the world. With stuff like Sutte Hakkun getting the spotlight, my retro sicko heart has never been more full.

There's still a massive library out there beyond merely the best SNES games.

There's a certain level of craft with making a video game that goes for minimalist visuals and gameplay – and it's one that solo developer Steph Thirion wanted to explore with his game Faraway. Taking control of a shooting star darting through the universe, you're tasked with ensuring that the lonely star keeps going on its journey by building up momentum and forming celestial patterns along the way.

Faraway is one of Annapurna Interactive's 2025 releases, and after playing some of its opening stages, I got to appreciate what exactly Thirion's game was all about. And from my talk with Thirion, he is especially inspired by Tetris and its approachable gameplay loop.

"I saw my mother pick up Tetris, and she immediately understood it and got hooked. I also see other people getting really, really good at Tetris, and there's this range of it being just a compelling game for any level, and it's extremely minimalistic as well," says Faraway game creator Steph Thirion. "I was interested in trying to make a game like that. Turns out it's very hard to do. In this case, there's definitely a difficulty curve. My mom can't pick it up that easily, but it's made so that it's compelling to new players and experienced players."

Shooting stars

Faraway is a game about guiding a shooting star through a procedurally generated universe. As you approach different constellations, you'll enter a mini-stage of sorts where you'll need to use the shooting star's momentum to build a line connecting stars to form a pattern. The thing that's so interesting about Faraway is that you can play the game with just one button – which acts as the boost and acceleration for the shooting star. Since the shooting star only moves forward on its own, the only way to turn is to accelerate towards stars, which will pull the shooting star in its orbit, allowing you to alter its path and slingshot to other stars.

It's a very interesting approach to momentum based action, and while it took me some time to really appreciate and grasp, it finally clicked for me when I was able to form a pattern in a cluster. Having the shooting star bob and weave between individual stars was so visually striking, that it almost felt like a dance. It's such a neat approach to minimal design, but it's also one that was very easy to fail on given that you can't cross lines with your pattern.

But according to the game creator, he wanted to ensure that Faraway keeps a mostly fair difficulty throughout, even when the game's stages and puzzle levels get more complex.

"There's no pressure with this game, and you get to try again and again in that little constellation [menus] if you fail and want to go again," he says. "So there's a really quick feedback loop of playing, failing, and then jumping right back in. I think these puzzles are really fun, and they allow a player to play on their own and there's not too much hand-holding. But I think it strikes the right balance of guidance and freedom for players."

Faraway really reminded me of the mid-2000s era of puzzle action games that were popular on Xbox Live and the PSP, which often focused on experience that married music and visuals in a stunning way. It was a nice surprise playing this minimalist puzzle game, and it's one game I'll be keeping an eye on in 2025.

See what other exciting releases are coming our way in our roundup of the biggest upcoming PC games for 2025 and beyond.

I'm a sucker for a good incremental game, but I've got to admit I never have the patience to truly master the endgame of, say, a Cookie Clicker. That's why I jumped to attention the second I saw Digseum, a $3 take on incrementals that's less than three hours long and has already garnered 98% positive reviews on Steam.

Digseum's Steam page describes it as a "short and sweet experience" with around two-and-a-half hours of playtime, during which you'll be "digging up ancient relics and building the greatest museum ever." This is the first Steam release for developer Rat Monthly, and it looks like a high-quality take on a very limited concept has paid off.

As I write this, Digseum has received 1,639 user reviews since its launch on December 9, 98% of which are positive. According to Steam250's rankings, that makes it the third highest-rated Steam game of the past 30 days, behind only the runaway hit MiSide and Awaria, the latest freebie from the developer behind cult hit Helltaker.

At just $3, I've already added Digseum to my library and I'm looking forward to firing it up when I've got a lazy morning to spare. As a small-scale idle game with a limited amount of playtime, it reminds me a bit of Install Fee Tycoon - though that game had an additional motive in parodying the ridiculous Unity fiasco of 2023 - and I'd love to see indies continue to explore this space.

"This is definitely my biggest life achievement": Idle Stardew Valley-like Rusty's Retirement hits top 50 highest-rated Steam games among the 11,000+ released in 2024.

We've just passed the 30th anniversary of the PlayStation, as well as the 20th anniversary of the PlayStation Portable! For the latter, Retro Gamer spoke to developers of games for Sony's handheld system. It was a great device for spotlight genres particularly suited to play on-the-go and in short bursts. What better fits the mold than a puzzle game?

Releasing at the system's launch in Europe, Archer Maclean's Mercury was, for many, the game that best defined what a new generation of portable puzzlers could be. As part of the anniversary celebrations, Retro Gamer spoke with Jeb Mayers, ex-head of R&D at Awesome Studios, about how it came to be.

Melting point

Retro Gamer: How did you come to work on a PSP launch game?

Jeb Mayers: I joined Awesome Studios in April 2003 as head of research and development. This was the first time I had met Archer Maclean. Archer was a hugely charismatic person, very passionate about everything he did, particularly his new ideas. They had a demo of a new game idea working on PC which was described as a 'ball in a maze' style puzzle – essentially it used some of the ball physics from the snooker games, grouped them together into a shiny metallic looking blob like the metal mercury. My job was to convert this to the PS2.

In May 2003, at that year's E3, Sony announced their plans for a new portable machine, the PSP. Archer being Archer was on to this like a shot – the idea of the Mercury running on a handheld device exactly like the old physical 'ball in a maze' puzzles was a perfect fit in his eyes. The other thing that Archer had been keen on was a tilt sensor which would allow you to actually control the device by moving it – I actually built prototypes of the tilt sensors for both PS2 and PSP, but alas this idea never made it to market.

RG: What support did you receive from Sony?

JM: We became official PSP developers in November 2003 – we were probably later to the party than some, but earlier than the majority of developers. All of the early work was done on the software PSP emulator written by Sony, which ran on a PC. Despite the robustness of the emulator, it was slow compared to the final hardware – particularly with regards to graphics, so for some developers it was a problem. The first hardware arrived at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe late June/early July 2004. It was fragile – two kits had been sent out to America and two to Europe. Three of them were DOA, so SCEE ended up with the only working development kit outside of Japan!

The developers who were most advanced or favoured were invited to come in to the SCEE offices and use the hardware in day-long sessions. The hardware proved to be tricky and was only half the clock speed of the final PSP. We were reliably told that the team that had the first slot on Monday had got nowhere. By the end of our first visit on 6 July, we had the dev Mercury frontend working. At this point we couldn't quite get into game, but we managed to get that sorted very early on in our subsequent visit on the Friday. Mercury was officially the first title that was fully working on the PSP hardware outside Japan! It was an incredibly proud moment for the team.

So back to the original question – how much help did we get from Sony? The answer is lots. But this was also a two-way thing, particularly around the time that the hardware became available, we were feeding back as much to Sony as they were to us. Sony would also turn to Mercury for all their tech demos for publishers, at internal events etc. It was a really special time for everyone at Awesome, and a first for me.

RG: What helped Mercury stand out from other games in the original launch line-up?

JM: It was a great game, it had a lot of levels, the music was fantastic, it looked great even though it was simplistic. As for standing out from the other launch titles? I am not sure that it did. Unfortunately, one of the other launch titles was Lumines – which was a fantastic game and had that Tetris-style pick-up-and-play addictive element to it. For a lot of people there they didn't entertain the idea of buying two puzzle-style games for their shiny new PSP so they chose Lumines.

If I had to answer the question I would say the one thing that Mercury did have going for it is that it was original. It wasn't another Ridge Racer, it wasn't another Tetris-style clone, or a fighting game, or WipEout etc. All of those games were great and I loved them of course, but Mercury was genuinely something new.

Looking for PlayStation Portable recommendations? Our best PSP games list is a great place to decide what to play next on the retro handheld!

Pikmin is a game all about throwing the cute little Pikmin at enemies, objects, and obstacles, but what's the fewest number of throws needed to actually beat the game? Turns out, it's just three, but you'll have to do some truly heinous things to the adorable critters to make it happen.

YouTuber Press A! has attempted this challenge before, completing the game in just 35 throws, so doing it in three is a staggering improvement. They break the game down into ship segments, detailing the minimum number of throws required to get each part back to the frame of Olimar's rocket.

The main engine and eternal fuel dynamo require no throws at all, lovely stuff. Just walk up and grab them. In total, 12 out of 30 parts don't need a single throw, but the other 18 require some form of throwing. How it's done without Olimar himself doing the throws is where things get both interesting and disturbing.

The first part that used to require a throw and no longer does is the positron generator held within a clam out on the water. Before, you'd have to throw blue Pikmin onto it to hit the part out, but you can instead simply drown your red Pikmin and shove the survivors' bodies up into the clam without a single throw.

The next parts are the extraordinary bolt and nova blaster. These need walls to be blown up and usually that requires yellow Pikmin being thrown while holding bomb rocks. Instead, you can simply leave some Pikmin in front of the walls as bait and run a Bulborb into them. While chomping down on the tasty Pikmin, the Bulborb activates the bomb rocks, blowing up itself, the Pikmin, and the wall. I did say this was disturbing.

"I love how anytime there's a problem in Pikmin 1, the solution is 90% of the time 'take a nap' or 'Multiple war crimes against the Pikmin species'", writes wafwaf485.

You should watch the rest of the video for yourself, as the tricks get more and more interesting and it's incredibly impressive seeing the game be beaten by bypassing its most core mechanic.

In the meantime, check out our list of the best Nintendo Switch games you can play right now.

This year has been another great year for indie games. While no major blockbuster release has dominated both fan and critic game discussions in 2024, independent teams are once again coming into the spotlight. From years-long anticipated releases to break-out hits, one trend that has emerged in the best indie games of 2024 is the number of absolutely stellar puzzle games.

Don’t get me wrong: for puzzle fans keeping up with the genre, every year is packed with great games. But, if you’re not an enthusiast, the genre generally gets overlooked and underestimated unless there’s a Return of the Obra Dinn or The Witness. However, this year is different. This year, puzzle games have not only dominated the indie space, but have been part of the wider gaming conversation too.

And it’s not just two or three games, either. There has been a bumper crop of indie puzzlers that encompass a wide range of subgenres – from layered Metroidvanias, arthouse puzzle adventures, to one of the best detective games of the decade getting a sequel. Puzzle games are having their moment in 2024 and I couldn’t be happier. I’m going to dive into a handful of the big ones, chuck a bunch more standout games at the end, and then reflect on why puzzle games are having their moment now.

Use your head

Let’s kick off with one of the most anticipated indie games of the year: The Rise of the Golden Idol. It’s quite the feat to have your debut game be called the best successor to Obra Dinn, but to then make your sequel even better is some magic. The Rise Of The Golden Idol’s approach to evidence gathering and fill-the-blanks whodunnits continues to be intuitive and engrossing puzzle design. To put it simply, The Rise of the Golden Idol is the first game but better; with deeper mysteries, updated UI, and a bigger, more complex story. Color Gray Games has cracked the code, and with a handful of DLCs on the way, I’ll be following the idol's bloody path into 2025.

Keeping in theme with highly anticipated indies, Animal Well was a game that many had their eye on – and not just because it was the first game to be backed by YouTuber Dunkey’s indie publisher Big Mode. There was an understanding that this game would not be your usual puzzle adventure, as evident from the game’s Day of the Devs preview. Developer Billy Basso hid a bunch of clues in the Day of the Dev's trailer that invited eagle-eyed viewers on a virtual Easter egg hunt that included hidden URLs, encrypted messages, a Picross nonogram, and a cipher from the 1500s. It’s a testament to what you should expect from Animal Well - a fantastic MetroidBrania whose mechanical puzzle rooms and obscure worldbuilding are just the beginning.

Obscure storytelling leads me right into Lorelei and The Laser Eyes, my personal pick for the best puzzle game of the year. A whole world away (an entirely different reality might be more accurate) from Simogo's first game Sayonara Hearts, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a powerhouse of design. Not only does it incorporate many different styles of puzzle, but even its story is a riddle to be solved. What impressed me the most was how, in most of the genre's games it's difficult to connect the story and the puzzles in a way that feels natural. There’s often a disconnect between the two – Professor Layton finds something for Luke to solve on the bottom of a soup can and then it’s straight back to the story. This isn’t true for all games, but Lorelei is the best example of how to seamlessly intertwine the two together. This combination of logic-based puzzle-solving and dreamy, nebulous storytelling is totally spellbinding.

Speaking of spells, let’s chat Tactical Breach Wizards. Now, I’m not a huge turn-based strategy fan or someone who likes the fiddlyness of spellcasting (Barbarian over Wizard in D&D every time for me), but TBW might well turn me into a convert. Its excellent cop-drama story and interesting counter to modern military games aside, Tactical Breach Wizards is an excellent puzzle game. First and foremost, you're encouraged to use your spellcasting squad's abilities to maneuver enemies around the space in a way that you can then take them out as efficiently as possible. That’s not unusual in strategy games, but what really solidifies TBW’s puzzle potential is that you can also undo moves and use your Navy Seer's ability to foresee the outcome of your turn's decisions. This means you can try different solutions until you find a combination of moves you’re satisfied with – creative problem-solving at its finest.

That’s four big puzzle hitters of the year, but there are still plenty more! This year's break-out hit, Balatro is not strictly labeled as a puzzle game, but it's certainly a game where you need to get your brain into gear, counting cards, crunching the numbers, and using math to work out what the best hand to play is. Other notable games include Arranger and its world-shifting puzzle design, Great God Grove’s focus on words and language, block-pushing adventure Isles of Sea and Sky, and the utterly authentic point-and-click callbacks in The Crimson Diamond.

I’m sure there's plenty more (sound off in the comments below) and I think this amount of certified bangers in the genre is due to a couple of reasons. The first is the boom in popularity of daily puzzle games like Wordle and as I said before, the lack of one blockbuster hit dominating game discussions, forcing players to look elsewhere. But I think the biggest reason is the changing way we think about the genre.

Puzzle games, the break-out indies from this year in particular, are more story-led in how they communicate their brainteasers. These stylish noirs, thrilling military shooters, and grisly murder mysteries are all accompanied by other engaging (and surprising) systems. Sure, we’ll always love the pure, minimalist puzzles offered by the likes of Sudoku or Picross, but I think 2024 is a reminder that the way we think of puzzle games needs to be broadened. In the future, when I think back to the games of 2024, I'll be reminded of how this year belonged to the indie puzzlers.

Go on, scratch that itch for thinkin' with these best puzzle games

Tetris: The Grand Master hit arcades way back in 1998, and its take on the Tetris formula had so much staying power that it remains one of the three main branches of the game that hardcore players discuss to this day. Now, a long-cancelled sequel to this series is coming out of the vault, getting the finishing touches, and coming to a much wider audience on Twitter.

Tetris: The Grandmaster 4 - Absolute Eye is "planned to be released on Steam by the end of March 2025," developer Arika announced on social media on December 2. This game was originally announced as a full arcade machine way back in 2009, and went as far as location testing in 2015 - though conspicuously, this version did not feature any proper Tetris branding. Whatever issue was holding the game back seems to be resolved now, at least, and now you won't even have to find an arcade to play it.

The original TGM was released back in 1998 by Arika - the studio of ex-Capcom devs who were then in the midst of making the Street Fighter EX series. Two sequels followed with The Absolute in 2000 and the even more imposingly named Terror Instinct in 2005, and altogether the series became a favorite for the most hardcore of Tetris players because of just how high the skill ceiling is. If you've heard about the legendary Tetris exhibitions at events like Games Done Quick, that's TGM. The video below is as good an example as any of what this game entails.

These days, hardcore Tetris players tend to adhere to one of three main game styles. There's Classic Tetris, which encompasses most of the old-school titles, most notably the NES version whose wild esports have been exploding since 2023. There's also Guideline Tetris, which features all the modern rule changes - stuff like T-spins and holding pieces - that The Tetris Company has set forth.

Finally, there's TGM, which - I mean this in the most complimentary way possible - feels like the Tetris variant for the true sickos. I'm honestly a little scared to try it out for myself, but I'm thrilled Absolute Eye is getting out to a wider audience on Steam.

It took 34 years for someone to actually beat the original NES Tetris – now it's coming to Switch so you can try for yourself.

Tetris for the NES has been generating headlines all year thanks to the explosion of interest when 13-year-old Willis 'Blue Scuti' Gibson became the first person to 'beat' the game. Now, Nintendo's giving you the opportunity to test your own skills with this version of the game, as it's just about to land in the Nintendo Switch Online classic game library.

Tetris officially launches into the Nintendo Switch Online NES library on December 12, Nintendo confirmed this week. This is one of the earliest versions of the game, and the first to be published by Nintendo on a home console. Thanks to its robust esports scene, it remains one of the most notable Tetris variants to this day, and many players simply refer to it as "classic Tetris."

If you've seen headlines over the past year about all sorts of wild-sounding Tetris accomplishments, those have all been about this version of the game. Classic Tetris was meant to get so fast that it would be impossible to continue playing past level 29, but players eventually developed techniques to hit the buttons fast enough to make it far deeper into the game.

The community's skill development came to a head in late 2023, when Blue Scuti became the very first person to 'beat' Tetris - crashing the game at level 157. Other players soon managed similar feats, and the community kept one-upping each other with new score world records and impressive tournament wins. One player has even far outdone the crash by achieving the game's mythical 'Rebirth.'

Will you be able to do all this on Switch when classic Tetris lands there? In theory, yes, though the Switch's NES emulator has a hair of input lag that'll mean you're playing at a handicap compared to those using original hardware. But if you want an example of just how wild the accomplishments these prodigies have managed over the past year truly are, you'll be able to find out firsthand very soon.

These are the best NES games of all time.