Petal Crash
(I backed this game on Kickstarter, so I got early access to it and beta tested it)
Most times I try a new puzzle game I end up bouncing off fairly quickly, but I managed to get a good hundred hours out of Petal Crash before moving on. As I tested the game and provided feedback on its design, I also thought about why I enjoyed it so much. Well…
The Gameplay
The first and most important thing is that the game’s content covers a wide range of intended skill levels. It was fun to be bad at petal crash, and even now that I’ve become extremely good at it I can still get some enjoyment out of the game’s hardest content. I ended up playing the game for a long time despite not having anyone to play with.
– Real player with 226.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Indie Pixel Graphics Games.
Petal Crash is one of the freshest new competitive puzzle games I’ve played in a long time, I simply cannot sing this game’s praises loudly enough! Mechanically it’s hard to compare it to any puzzle game I’ve played, and that’s a good thing as I love seeing unique new ideas. While the usual win condition of filling up your opponent’s board with garbage exists, it’s actually somewhat rare to win this way in my experience (but certainly not impossible, you will see it sometimes). Instead the alternative win condition you should be focusing on is the Battle Bar, a tug-of-war meter that pushes towards the opponent’s side every time you clear pieces, with the boundaries shrinking over time, until someone reaches the edge to lose a stock and the bar resets. Take three stocks from your opponent and you win the match.
– Real player with 137.1 hrs in game
Baba Is You
A simple concept taken to creative extremes. Just when you think you’ve figured out all the tricks, a hard level comes along and forces you to rethink your understanding of the mechanics. Absolutely worth full price.
– Real player with 139.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Indie Difficult Games.
This was already one of my all-time favorite games, but I feel compelled to write some complementary words since the release of this MASSIVE free update! It’s such a fantastic thing to have this much new content added for free. The new levels are great and the editor is extremely powerful, though I’ve barely scratched the surface with it. The quality and quantity of the base game was already incredible for such a low price, and now it’s even better.
– Real player with 100.5 hrs in game
Zup! Z
🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉🆉
𝒁𝒖𝒑! 𝒁 𝒊𝒔 𝒂 𝒈𝒐𝒐𝒅 𝒑𝒖𝒛𝒛𝒍𝒆 𝒈𝒂𝒎𝒆 𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝒂 𝒇𝒐𝒄𝒖𝒔 𝒐𝒏 𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒂𝒎 𝒂𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒔
𝑾𝒆𝒍𝒍, 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆’𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒎𝒖𝒄𝒉 𝒕𝒐 𝒕𝒂𝒍𝒌 𝒂𝒃𝒐𝒖𝒕, 𝑰 𝒄𝒂𝒏 𝒐𝒏𝒍𝒚 𝒔𝒂𝒚 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒈𝒂𝒎𝒆 𝒊𝒏 𝒈𝒆𝒏𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒍 𝒊𝒔 𝒄𝒐𝒐𝒍 𝒕𝒐 𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒚 𝒊𝒇 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒃𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒆𝒔𝒔 𝒊𝒔 𝒑𝒖𝒛𝒛𝒍𝒆𝒔, 𝒉𝒐𝒘𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓 𝒎𝒐𝒔𝒕 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒔𝒆 𝒑𝒖𝒛𝒛𝒍𝒆𝒔 𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒒𝒖𝒊𝒕𝒆 𝒆𝒂𝒔𝒚 𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒆𝒙𝒄𝒆𝒑𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒐𝒇 𝒂 𝒇𝒆𝒘 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒘𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒃𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒌 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒉𝒆𝒂𝒅 𝒂 𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒍𝒆.
– Real player with 11.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Indie Physics Games.
Tbh I bought this for the achievements so I could make a fancy Steam profile. The game is actually pretty good, though, for a little puzzler. It’s not too hard, but not so simple that it’s boring. Watching the little balls fly around is pretty entertaining. There are also some good YouTube guides out there that will help you complete all of the achievements, if you want to go that route. Either way it’s worth the ~$1.
7/10ish for the whole experience.
– Real player with 1.9 hrs in game
Quell
Great puzzle game. It’s inspired by a style of game we’ve seen many times before, but they managed to add enough new features to make it feel fresh and to keep me interested throughout my playthrough and more, since I’ve started playing the sequel, Quell Reflect, as soon as I completed this game.
Every level has two optional objectives. First one is to finish the level in a set amount of moves. I normally don’t like these in puzzle games since it’s often badly done with levels that are too big, but in this game, levels rarely require more than 20 moves to complete (most of the time it’s between 7 and 15), and even when they do it’s simply because you have to find the most efficient order to collect the pearls, and it’s actually fun to replay the level and try to reach the goal.
– Real player with 26.4 hrs in game
quell is a very relaxing puzzle game where you control a raindrop and try to collect all the pearls by bumping from wall to wall. it has all the quality of life options and features (windowed mode, volume sliders, save files, multiple profiles, instantaneous level reset, undo, etc.), a great soundtrack and a variety of ways to play. if you only want to go through the 84 levels quickly, you can do that, you can even use coins you collect to unlock levels apart from the very next one, but you can also go for the least possible moves for extra challenge, satisfaction and coins, and try to find the jewel hidden on each level.
– Real player with 11.8 hrs in game
Tametsi
I have never been so ensnared by a logic game. Hexcells held that record (as another improvement on Minesweeper) until this game. Out of the 133 boards available at the time of this review, I finished every single one and probably resorted to guessing maybe half a dozen times. The point of a game like this is to be hard but not impossible so you don’t resort to guessing, and it almost accomplishes that goal. I do think there are a couple of ways to hit roadblocks that can’t be reasoned out, but I’m sure I overlooked a few solutions in that handful of times that I just clicked on my best bet.
– Real player with 503.0 hrs in game
possibly the best pure logic game ever created, with absolutely zero fluff outside of a few cute layouts and some neat colors. some sort of nightmarish cross between nonograms, minesweeper, sudoku, and unmitigated genius. a lot is accomplished with very little, and there is a lot of very good quality-of-life, like automatic puzzle progress saving, the ability to tackle many different puzzles at once if you’re stuck on any one puzzle, the draw tool. no, i have not played hexcells, but i cannot imagine that it has much left to offer after this game. i think i have mastered regular polygonal tiling by now.
– Real player with 278.9 hrs in game
Recursed
This is an excellent puzzle game.
I guess it’s a puzzle “platformer”, but the platforming aspects are simple and mostly subservient to the puzzles, though a very small number of puzzles do require a little bit of platforming finesse.
The puzzle mechanics are where the game shines. Jumping into a chest spawns you in a ‘fresh copy’ of ‘the room inside the chest’, and as the title suggests, you can recursively explore chests and carry them to other chests to create an interesting tangle of rooms. Items like keys to unlock doors, and blocks to stand on to gain height to reach platforms, feature in early simple puzzles, but later puzzles introduce really interesting an unexpected mechanics that will take some experimenting to tease apart in order to use them. (And if you’re a programmer, you’ll be trying to make analogies to what you know of control flow, static/instance storage, threads, closures, … though not all of the game mechanics map perfectly into programming constructs.)
– Real player with 46.2 hrs in game
tl;dr
This is a game about manipulating space, so you could say it’s in the same vein of games like Portal. The game has charm, deeper mechanics, and clean level design. It’s fair yet very hard, and ultimately very satisfying to solve. SO WHY HASN’T THIS SOLD A MILLION COPIES!? WHY AREN’T YOU ALREADY PLAYING IT!? This game is a serious mind fuck and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s one of my favorite puzzle games.
Overview
This is a puzzle platformer based on functional programming, with chests as the main mechanic. But there are many smaller mechanics (like gravity and water) and nuances that all work together to create a surprisingly vast possibility space. The general difficulty progression and level design is great! So long as you properly learn and understand what’s going on in the easier levels, the harder levels shouldn’t give you TOO much trouble… Also, creating paradoxes or invalidities dumps you into secret levels! It’s puzzle-ception!
– Real player with 39.3 hrs in game
Orbox C
First got into this game after watching another person’s video clip on this game where he went through the first few levels. Took a look at the description on Steam, and given it’s only $2.99, decided to give this a try, as I’m into puzzle games. No regrets on this decision, as this is a very nice puzzle game with many interesting elements in it.
Graphics: When you open the game, it starts in full screen, but you can modify it to a smaller screen size, which I usually do. Nice Sci-fi space graphics that change from level to level, so you’re not looking at the exact same background each time. Sprites are simple and easily labeled so that you know what you’re looking at.
– Real player with 50.2 hrs in game
At about 12:30am I received an email from Arseniy Shkljaev wanting me to shoot a gameplay video for Orbox C. I’d been working at the time and was due for a break. I hit the game’s Steam store page and immediately knew that I’d enjoy playing the game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SycMDceA_co
What is Orbox C?
You see, Orbox C is a puzzle game. Further, it looks like the type of game that has some action gameplay components to it. It requires critical thinking and quick thought. As one may suspect, this is entirely up my alley. I’ve played very similar games before – it’s not a new concept per se – but it’s a very interesting take on the genre.
– Real player with 21.2 hrs in game
Pictopix
Pictopix is definitely one of the best picross games on PC I’ve had chance to play.
You like puzzle games? Good jazz & bossa-nova? Nicely done graphics and pixel art? Well, it’s your lucky day because Pictopix is very good choice. The price may seem heavy, but trust me, if you need a relaxing time waster and really like picross puzzles - definitely a good buy.
So, I’ve played it a bit now. All puzzles are logically solvable, albeit they can be done by intuition. Can’t say if they get harder, well the puzzles do get bigger in size, but that’s not a big difficulty changer.
– Real player with 274.5 hrs in game
EDIT: With the latest update, larger puzzles have been added! I am thrilled to bits and can not wait to finish them all! This game honestly gets better and better the longer I play it!
I’m giving it a 5 of 5 stars now!
I’ve been following this game before it was even greenlit. I have played many piccross games before, so I was quite excited with it’s release! The gameplay is pretty simple to follow, so those of you new to piccross games will have no issues. The puzzles themselves are very well thought out. I enjoyed playing all of them, especially the secret bonus levels that you can unlock at the end (if you figure out how.) The gameplay music is rather nice, so it makes gameplay relaxing. I wish there were more tracks available, but if you become bored with it, the option to mute the music is available.
– Real player with 194.0 hrs in game
Tetrobot and Co.
The Game
Tetrobots are a line of small, cubic robots. Maya, a brilliant young engineer, has been given a number of damaged tetrobots to repair. She has built Psychobot, an even smaller robot, which she injects into the tetrobots so that it can repair them from the inside. Along the way she will find clues pointing to the location of her friends and mentors, Alexei and Marcus. This is a sideways-on puzzle game where you control Psychobot.
The Puzzles
There are a series of flick-scrolling screens, through which you guide Psychobot. There are various obstacles, like laser beams, collapsable barriers, and so on. The basic aim is to get to the exit portal on each level, but there are also memory blocks to collect, which unlock later tetrobots. There are various blocks lying around, which you can collect and store in your inventory. You can pick up a block if you are on the same horizontal level as it, and any distance away, as long as there nothing to block the line to it. You can also fire it out, on a horizontal level, and it will travel until it hits something. Blocks are affected by gravity.
– Real player with 61.9 hrs in game
Smooth evolution of Blocks That Matter (BTM) and its ideas.
It’s about:
-
solving puzzles with blocks made from different materials (wood, sand, glass, stone and etc.);
-
the core of each puzzle is collecting, throwing blocks, build a different figures from them or interact with level’s environment using properties of blocks’ material: wood isn’t immune to fire, sand transforms into glass (or ice / water into steam) after heating, steel is pulled by magnet and etc.
– Real player with 31.5 hrs in game
She Remembered Caterpillars
This is a puzzle game based on navigating little fungus people (gammies) to launch pads, so they can fly away. Getting there involves crossing caterpillar bridges and other obstacles. The gammies are marked by a colour and a shape, which dictates which obstacles they can cross. Using colours and shapes gives a backup for anyone who can’t use one or the other, which is helpful for colourblindness or not being able to see fine detail very well.
Progress through the game is split into acts, which slowly take the player higher up a structure. Each act has a distinctive art theme, which reflects the feel of the story at that point. I loved the style of the art. It’s hand drawn and whimsical, in a twisted fungal kind of way.
– Real player with 10.4 hrs in game
She Remembered Caterpillars takes a simple colour matching formula and expands upon it as you progress. As the plot thickens and becomes more complex, so do the puzzles, and you’ll want to see the story through to the end–no matter how much you need to wrack your brains in order to complete the puzzle at hand.
This is one of those games that you have to take a moment to digest after you’ve completed it. I’m not entirely sure what happened in the 40 chapters that transpired, though I’m sure there are some passionate forum posts somewhere arguing symbolism and the like, but what I am sure is that it was a sweet story that featured the simple love of a parent and child.
– Real player with 7.4 hrs in game