Volvox
This review recommends Neotenia’s puzzle game Volvox for its excellent, challenging gameplay and puzzle design, despite some rough aesthetics.
[. . .] Volvox‘s deceptively simple core mechanics (rotating and reorienting triangles by moving them around the levels and around each other) open the door for mind-bending levels that often function like brain teasers. [. . .]
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– Real player with 35.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Difficult Puzzle Games.
Volvox is a strange and fascinating experience that you have to play if you like interesting game mechanics and wonderful 2D graphics.
In Volvox you control monocular and triangular creatures, called Trimoebas, in order to reach the “end” of each level. Every puzzle is a new step in the long journey to form various organisms. You have to make the Trimoebas “roll” to create more complex structures as you progress in the game, and you will use their special properties (like glue and explosion…) to solve challenging puzzles.
– Real player with 14.4 hrs in game
Kells
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Kells is a retro puzzle game similar to the original Lemmings except instead of issuing specific commands to your Kells, you manipulate their movement using special Gravity Tiles instead. These tiles change the direction of gravity as Kells walk or fall over them, allowing you to manipulate your Kells in crazy ways like making them “fall upwards” to clear obstacles, “fall forward” to avoid dangerous spike pits, and even walk up or down walls!
Objective
The objective seems deceptively simple! All you have to do in each level is figure out how to get your Kells from the entrance to the exit flag. The thing is, you can’t control them directly and unlike in Lemmings, you can’t issue them commands either. What you can do is place tiles around the level to change the flow of gravity! Can you figure out how to make use of careful Gravity Tile placement to guide your Kells on a journey through 100 levels and 8 themed islands to find the mysterious Last Level?
The Kellective
As you progress through the game, you’ll find many lost Kells on your journey to build up The Kellective and make it stronger and stronger. You will care for your Kells - you can rest them when they are injured, check in on them between levels to see how they are feeling and mourn them when they die.
Uncover many secrets and hidden treasures
Kells is full of secrets and unexpected twists and turns! There are secret coins that initially seem impossible to reach. There are secret passageways and areas to uncover. There are mysterious competitions and game modes to unlock. Rumour has it, apparently there is even an entire secret island hidden away somewhere on the world map!
Other Highlights
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There are various routes to the Last Level - will you opt for the easier, longer route or risk the difficult route in order to reach The Last Level quicker?
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There are 100 Levels in total scattered across the World Map. Can you complete them all? Better still, can you PERFECT them all?
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Can you track down all the missing Kells and fully restore the Kellective?
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For completionists, there are 10 Purple Kellectibles scattered around the levels in difficult-to-access locations. Can you kellect them all?
Read More: Best Difficult Puzzle Games.
Inklings
FUN STUFF
– Real player with 13.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Difficult 2D Games.
I bought this looking for a good Lemmings-style puzzle game on Steam.
Inklings doesn’t blow you away, but it’s solidly good: challenging and well-made.
It’s faithful to the original Lemmings with usable controls, simple understandable mechanics, and a unique graphics style.
It’s enjoyable.
The biggest con is that some of the puzzles aren’t super elegant, requiring hacky solutions or careful timing that is annoying to get right. But, if you’re looking for Lemmings, this is as good as you’re going to get.
– Real player with 4.6 hrs in game
Swarm the City: Zombie Evolved
I have mixed feelings about this game. While I enjoy’d the gameplay, the game is not completely finished. There is a final chapter that doesn’t unlock, and it really bums you out. Like wtf? It leaves you feeling like you haven’t really beat the game. There’s no congratulation, no finally.. You’re left unable to get legendary parts for upgrades, cause they’re locked behind unreachable levels I guess..? I dunno. It’s rude to charge $15 for a game that isn’t even finished.
For now I am down voting because that is rude on the devs part to release an unfinished game. If the game is finished I will likely change my rating.
– Real player with 31.1 hrs in game
I just kept repeating the process of summoning and dying!!! It’s a lot of fun
At the beginning, the game is kinda easy, but it gets hard once you reach chapter 3, and that’s where strategy is needed. Strategy matters a lot, you have to actually think before you start taking actions. It might still be possible that you keep dying unless you are a hardcore rts player.
Even that, Swarm the City is still good for rts starters. The pause function in the game will make it easier for those new rts players to take a break and think about the next move.
– Real player with 16.1 hrs in game
Save the Dodos
Save the Dodos is a highly addictive puzzle game where the aim on most levels is (surprise surprise) to save as many Dodos as you can. There are 4 worlds and each world has 25 levels in it to complete. Most of the time you are asked to save a set number of Dodos, though some levels will ask you collect fruit and store it away in a nest or simply survive for a certain amount of time whilst avoiding enemies and enviromental hazards. As you progress through the world’s the enemies become tougher and more in numbers on some levels, but the game does a good job of never making you feel overwhelmed to the point of rage quitting. As with most good puzzle games you will spend ages looking at a puzzle and trying to figure out the solution, only to see it was staring you in the face all along. The art beautifully done and the soundtrack is one that you can happily listen too in the background without ever feeling the need to mute it. For anyone who likes the classic game Lemmings or if you just enjoy a good puzzle game then this game is a must play. Also at £1.99 the value for money is great :)
– Real player with 11.0 hrs in game
Save the Dodos is a modern Lemmings game with dodos! Use the mouse to swap the terrain around and make sure all your derpy dodos reach the exit safely without getting killed. The game has 100 levels to complete.
I’m quite impressed by the game! The terrain is divided in smaller squares. You use the mouse to swap the terrain both horizonal and vertical. The levels get more challenging as you move on, but some levels have some clever loopholes that make them very easy once you figured it out. You start with just the standard dodo, but as you move on you’ll unlock different dodos that have some unique ability compared to the original one. This can make a level extra easy or hard (depending on what youre trying to do).
– Real player with 10.2 hrs in game
Top Gang
Top Gang is a very chaotic platform game for up to 4 players cooperative. In Top Gang you have to eliminate all the enemies in the level to be able to advance at the same time you have to rescue the “Nuggets” and take them safely to the exit. Your friends can be a great help or a stumbling block because while the game is cooperative it is also competitive who can rescue more “Nuggets”?
Elemental advantages and disadvantages
Each character has their own element giving them advantages with their respective elements.
Use weapon recoil to your advantage
It is possible to escape situations or do some maneuvers using the weapon’s recoil.
History
The Nuggets are a peaceful and friendly race but also very tasty, tired of being captured all the time by the black mask gang they made a magical ritual that ended up going wrong and freeing the elemental ghosts that instead of helping them joined the gang of black mask. With no way out they went to the Top Gang firm to ask for help, Shack Joe being the leader of the company accepted the request and gathered his group to rescue the captured nuggets and destroy all the elemental ghosts.
Contraption Maker
I used to like this game. A lot. I won firts place in one of their contests, and second place in another. For which I received reward in the form of steam games. Contraption maker is a great example of a game that never stops growing. Even now, they keep adding new content to it.
But… things havetemporarily changed.
Top Meadow and Game Dev Castle took over the development and publishing of the game, and I get the feeling that they don’t really care about the game itself anymore. They look at things from a rather business perspective which is bad for this type of game’s health. I am talking about DLC packs, and the fact that they ruin this game’s fun of uploading and sharing contraptions, puzzles and mods.
– Real player with 205.6 hrs in game
If I think about my earliest days of video gaming, back before I got into my classic platformers like Sonic the Hedgehog, the title that stands out to me the most (amidst many education-focused games) was The Incredible Machine. A game that tests your ingenuity to solve puzzles, and your imagination to create them. Many of my fondest gaming memories from those days came from T.I.M. I got this game when it was in alpha, and the fact that I got to play any part in this game’s development, even just by messing around with the parts and reporting bugs, is something truly special to me.
– Real player with 37.8 hrs in game
Dwarflings
This is a really likeable tactical puzzle game with oldschool taste which feels like the mix of Lemmings and Commandos. Here’re some reasons why you would like it (without particular order):
1. Art is simple, but very nice and with great attention to details, and quite a lot of them make you smile.
2. Rules and controls are very easy to learn, you do not really question how to play the game, you just play.
3. Levels are well-thought and each built around its own idea. There’s no complexity for the sake of complexity. Many of them will make you scratch your head, but once you get it right you go through. It never gets too long to bore you. Harder levels are sometimes followed with the easier to relax a bit, and then there’s a new puzzle.
– Real player with 16.5 hrs in game
Do not buy this, it is a terrible excuse for a game. It says it is “Lemmings meets Lost Vikings” but both of those were clever, well thought-out games that were fun - this is definitely not. Add in the covert in-app purchases and I think you have the measure of its design.
In short, you click one of a few icons to get the dwarf you are controlling to do something. The game has no charm, subtlety or depth. I am fairly sure that very few people continued far in, judging by the % ratings on each achievement. It only appears that I have played it for 11 hours because I idled it for the cards. I will now be uninstalling it and not wasting any more time on this poor effort.
– Real player with 10.9 hrs in game
Ctrl CV
What felt like an eternity was mearly 20 hours. I mostly played offline. The pain of this game is hard to put into words but I will try in the hopes that I will prevent someone like you from stumbling across a similar fate. To the game! All right, so this game is a puzzle based platformer. Buyer Beware! Don’t play this game if you have a weapon lying around. You might use it to shoot yourself, or worse, your computer. Don’t let it fool you, you won’t get lost in the sea of neverending copies of yourself, only in the sea of your despair. You’ll think you have one level completely figured out only to find that you did the whole damn thing wrong. And to make matters worse, if you press esc to scratch your nose or something, YOU LOSE ALL OF YOUR PROGRESS BACK UNTIL YOUR LAST SAVE. There is no pause button and you will froget on countless occasions losing up to ten minutes of hard work. You can expect to play each level around twenty to fifty times to move on to the next level. The sea of clones is mostly an anoyance as the character you play as has a different face than the clones. The “find” mechanic was therefore completely unnecesary. There will come a point in this game were you have put so much effort into getting where you are now that it would seem crazy to even think about quitting. At this monumental point you will just need to take a deep breath and keep on pushing. The only reason I reccomend this game is for the people out there who I know are like me and like a good challenge to help them froget about how much the world hates them. And for whoever is still reading this you should stop now because I am just going to keep on talking and there is no way that anybody can make me stop please go away it is New Years and I’m alone all by myself Why doesn’t anybody love me I think I’m just going to end it and I don’t mean this post becuase like I said I’m just going to keep on typing. My new gaming pc hasn’t come in the mail yet so I have to game on my school laptop with a pentium cpu and no graphics so I stumbled across this game literally stumbled and broke all of the bones in my body and im now in a full body cast because of the emotional trauma brought on by this game. I hear explosions the world is probably ending around me o wait it is firecrackers lit off by people at parties who have actually friends and enjoy life. Too bad that isn’t me o well I’ll just keep typing then. If any of you would like to read my ranting more you can find me on Donald Trumps Twitter acount.
– Real player with 13.2 hrs in game
It was interesting at first, but during the factory levels, it lost its quality. Turrets fire during black-outs a lot of times, not even giving you a chance to evade. It’s all a gamble by then. Easy and hard mode aren’t much different. By the time you get to the factory levels, the clones aren’t really a problem in either mode and the whole point of the game is not even there anymore. Instead, you get unfair black-outs as a replacement. It goes from needing good sight to needing luck. The game seems to become worse as it goes on. I never was even able to complete the factory levels. The start was decent though, as the clones actually were relevant then. Even if you take the factory out of the equation, it is filled with cheap deaths such as pitfalls and spikes at the beginning of the level that kill you before you can know what is going on if you start out moving (which you probably would be).
– Real player with 2.7 hrs in game
Zombie Night Terror
Zombie Night Terror can be summarized in two game titles: Lemmings and Left 4 Dead. And yet it manages to be its own thing.
For once, the aim is not to prevent the apocalypse but to make sure it happens. In order to do so, the player guides a horde of zombies that walk in a straight line (Lemmings) by giving them specialized Zombie powers (Left 4 Dead).
Lemmings had a very cool concept and it was a gaming landmark, but it did not exactly expand into a fruitful genre. The reason why is that the core gameplay loop ended up being quite repetitive after a while, because on one hand only a select few Lemmings acquired a power that allowed them to survive, and on the other hand the higher difficulty levels ended up being a tedious chore of bridge building.
– Real player with 42.4 hrs in game
If you want the pros and cons skip ahead, but first I want to address some of the complaints I’ve seen about this game (and why you should ignore them).
“Difficulty ramps up too quickly” - Now there are definitely some levels that are significantly harder than the ones before it, but isn’t that kind of what you want out of a game? You might fail a level the first or second playthrough, but then you squeak out a win, and that’s much more satisfying than just blazing through every level. Some of the bonus challenges are very hard, but it’s none of them are required to actually win the game.
– Real player with 31.9 hrs in game