Antichamber
I will be honest. When I first played Antichamber I didn’t like it. The visuals put me off, not because I wanted better visuals but because I had this dumb notion that if the graphics were not good then how could I trust that the puzzles were watertight? Once I finally overcame this utter stupidity, I was ready to play Antichamber. Not all puzzle games need to be visually awesome like Talos, Witness and Portal. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I was high…..but I couldn’t have been high because when I started getting into Antichamber I felt like I was REALLY high….like call me an ambulance, my brain is turning into jelly, high.
– Real player with 22.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Puzzle Surreal Games.
The game opens with players spawning in a small, black room with a cartoon-style picture of a fetus on the wall. The first thing the player sees are these words: “Every journey is a series of choices. The first is to begin the journey.” Players then turn to find a second wall labeled “All You Need to Know” that displays the options and the control scheme for the game, as well as a third wall labeled “Choose Your Destination” that acts as Antichamber’s sort of level select feature. The map on this wall is initially only one room big, forcing players to select the very first room with only a vague idea of what this first “level” might hold for them.
– Real player with 13.8 hrs in game
ReThink
Rethink is a puzzle franchise by Yaeko games a single indie Dev. It was originally released in mar 2017 and then completely overhauled again in a reworked version at the end of 2018 due to feedback and criticism from various gamers wanting more optimisation.
It’s an impossible task to please EVERYBODY while at the same time playing catch up with technological advances, being there for tech support and at the same time creating something new to the franchise, but that’s exactly what he seems to have done. He has been trying to please everybody.
– Real player with 29.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Puzzle Logic Games.
I’m used to FPP games (First Person Puzzle if you need a translation). Completed the Talos Principle, the Portal series and its main mods (Tag, Mel before the story mode patch), Q.U.B.E., Antichamber, the Witness, some others I forgot the name of (Magnetic Cage Closed? something like that)…
So when I saw that game in the store, I was: “oh, seems nice, I should try it”. Then I did.
And honestly? I don’t regret it.
When I first played the game, I noticed one downside: no rebindable keys. Asked about it in the forum, it got patched in (and fixed) in the following days. So now, I don’t see any problem.
– Real player with 8.4 hrs in game
The Spectrum Retreat
Thank you to the developer, Dan Smith Studios, and publisher Ripstone for creating and providing a game for me to escape, explore and enjoy.
The Spectrum Retreat hangs its gameplay aspects on familiar puzzle grounds but the story is more adult and realistic in nature. It’s able to maintain a sense of suspense and mystery throughout and is smart enough to know when to end. I usually would detail some of the story but its one of those that should be experienced without any prior knowledge. If you are a fan of the likes of old school sci fi, Outer limits, Stephen King and todays news in general I don’t think you would be disappointed.
– Real player with 7.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Puzzle Strategy Games.
The Spectrum Retreat is an okay puzzle game to sum it up easily. You are a man who wakes up in a hotel with no knowledge of who you are or why you’re there. The staff is robotic and you’re contacted clandestinely by a woman who promises to help you escape. Your goal is to explore the hotel to find a way to the roof.
Puzzles come in two parts. The first is finding the code to a door that leads to an authentication chamber. Most of this part is spent wandering the hotel looking for clues to the code, usually in or near one of the amenities the hotel provides. During this part, there is a lot of exposition as you learn more about why you are here.
– Real player with 7.0 hrs in game
Fabric
It all started with a guy by the name of Boris Michael Soylu who entered a concept he was working on into one of those 7DFPS contests. His idea consisted of taking the space time bending mechanic that was present in the 2D plat-former called ‘Faultline’ by Nitrome https://youtu.be/bG_dgL1cPQU and enlarging that principle to a 3D world. The idea was a huge success and well received and from there on the project was immediately hand-balled to three level designers, Atil Kockar (Now with Chimera Entertainment), Anton Semchenko (Now with Kabuk Games) and Enes Ugur Sekerci (Now with King). As you can probably tell these three developers who made up Torreng Labs have all gone their separate ways and Torreng Labs no longer exists as a commercial entity. This is why you won’t find ‘Fabric’ on the Steam store anymore.
– Real player with 57.3 hrs in game
This game is pretty awesome. It’s introduces a new mechanic of folding time (with cubes) to help complete levels. Once you get past some rage and understand the mechanics, it’s very straight forward. Think Qbeh-1, Portal, and Parkour. If you’re a first person puzzle maniac like me, get this.
Things to know:
The green cube in some levels is a save point.
Most levels do not have save points.
The levels are a mix of easy to hard all the way to the end.
Some levels you can become trapped, though this is pretty rare and if you put your brain on overdrive, you can solve most anything.
– Real player with 15.7 hrs in game
Only Me
This is a first-person story suspense independent game
The story is a tense space game
Game content: main stealth, secondary shooting
The goal is to complete the customs according to the prompts
But normal clearance is not the end of the game
Players can observe the details of the scene to ponder the plot, item information, etc.
Do the logical series by yourself, find the hidden truth behind the whole incident, and reach the true ending.
ReThink | Evolved 2
As fun and compelling as the previous. The bigger levels are imposing but upon solving or watching the French kid solve them on youtube, they are very logical. Know that some lights don’t care what color they are lit with while others are picky and watch for the mirror surfaces, all of them are there for a reason. Keep in mind these levels are interconnected so you might have to get resources from the last level into the next one.
Love how the boxes show the multiple target sites, have gotten used to this from the first one and think I’m doing alot better!
– Real player with 31.8 hrs in game
Great button and cube puzzler with light reflection optics added - if you like games like Talon Principle or Portal, give this a try - it has very little in the way of story, just a collection of puzzles, but it is satisfying. The interior graphics are beautiful, very crisp and believable modern decor, and the mood is very relaxing. I found myself pausing to view a sunset or moonrise out of the windows.
Only real drawback is the lack of a storyline - in fact, if the developers had added an AI type character to control testing (earning release to the outside world), this could easily have elevated story-richness and broaden the game’s appeal due to the fact that the game already has the player navigating through rooms in a sequence while being teased with tantalizingly beautiful exterior views of a city and flying vehicles which you do not seem to be able to reach.
– Real player with 17.3 hrs in game
ReThink | Evolved 3
DISCLAIMER : I helped testing this game, and received a free key from the developer. Opinions expressed here are mine, but take them with a grain of salt anyway.
Rethink Evolved 3 is pretty good IMO. If you come from the other games in the series you’ll be right at home. Expect a game that’s maybe easier than the previous titles, but with some cool new ideas and mechanics like color screens decomposing the colors of your lasers, and colored crystals serving as power sources of the lasers that you can swap.
– Real player with 12.4 hrs in game
A new puzzler in the ReThink series: This means the visuals are deceptively simple in design, but very elegant and just beautiful. You need to use cubes, with various functions - linear redirect, fork, 3 fork, switch between forks etc. - to redirect coloured laser light to specific “detectors” to open glass doors to access the next puzzle. As with the previous games, you are able to e.g. split white light into its R,G,B components, and several puzzles make clever use of combining light colours, redirect that to a certain place, to then split it again.
– Real player with 11.5 hrs in game
ReThink | Evolved 4
This is the seventh game in the ReThink franchise and the fourth game in the ReThink | Evolved series, and this is definitely the best one so far. Some new cubes and new mechanics have been added which allow for more complex puzzles than previous games, and they definitely added to my enjoyment.
The core concept of the ReThink games is to light a series of colored targets with laser light. How you combine the lasers to achieve the correct colors and how you place and angle the lasers to hit the correct targets is up to you. Sometimes the puzzles are easy, sometimes the puzzles are difficult, and sometimes the puzzles are quite tricky. There were many times when I was scratching my head for a bit and finally had the “Aha!” moment, which was very fulfilling. Also, from what I recall of the previous games in the franchise, this one is more spacious, with many of the puzzles spanning several sections.
– Real player with 23.4 hrs in game
Another good puzzle game by Yaeko. Compered to previous Rethink games (I played most of the franchise) this one has many new cool features and the puzzles are a bit harder. If you haven’t played any of the Rethink games before, I wouldn’t start with this one. See you all on Rethink 5
– Real player with 13.7 hrs in game
ReThink | Evolved
So, I know puzzle games are supposed to be puzzling, but the difficulty ramp in this game is a bit extreme. Literally you go through 3 or 4 trivial rooms then hit a gigantic puzzle room with multiple targets, auto-catapults, and elevators. Not the best design choice, in my opinion. There seems to be an assumption that mechanics and design are familiar, but I don’t think that first “real” puzzle has been properly trained for.
That said, for the most part the rest of the game is fun, though I’ve had to look through some walkthroughs as some of the manipulatable targets are simply plain black tiles that blend into the wall graphics.
– Real player with 17.8 hrs in game
This is a beautifully rendered logic game that fans of Portal will enjoy for the chance to solve more button and cube tests within a pristine futuristic architecture but with the clever addition of light puzzles - reflection, redirection, addition & subtraction of colors. You are in a building made of glass and panels, you can see the outside world with busy aircars bustling about but until you solve the puzzles, you are on your own - no GladOS, Wheatley or announcer, and no real chance of death. The music is very relaxing and will stay with you, and the architecture is so beautiful that I often just stand in various spots and enjoy it (there’s the pity that it can’t be visited!). The Evolved series differs from the other ReThink series in that you have full ability to place and point cubes anywhere rather than just at designated spots.
– Real player with 15.0 hrs in game
ReThink 2
Pros: Excellent game series as always. The puzzles are much more difficult. I love these first person puzzle games.
Best price in the genre at $10
10/10
Cons:
I quit at lvl 40, it just seems too hard after several days.
EDIT: I beat lvl 40 finally realizing what I missed, will continue on
Game has laser glitches where changing a laser cube may leave connected laser colors that shouldn’t be allowed to stay within the game rules.
– Real player with 38.0 hrs in game
Got stuck on room 40 for anywhere from 2-4 hours, got bored and softlocked myself into room 39 using a laser from room 40. I’m just going to assume that’s how the game was meant to end, since I’m not smart enough to figure out 40’s actual solution and my pride doesn’t allow yet for looking up solutions externally.
The first ReThink was easy enough that I assumed later games would similarly be walks in the park, but I cannot salute the developer enough for constantly finding ways to consistently step up the difficulty in every iteration. If you like indie first-person puzzlers, get every game in this series. The mechanics are simple enough to grasp, but still offer a lot of challenge.
– Real player with 13.1 hrs in game