Welcome to Puzzle Lovers! - Play Hard. Think Harder.

(continued from part 1)
New Demos:

The Demo of the Week is DEG.

• 👍 Alruna: End of History (platformer, metroidvania): Sequel to last year’s game, with more of the same. Explore interconnected rooms, unlock new powers, repeatedly defeat (or avoid) lesser monsters, get keys, and unlock new paths. Or look for the secret paths that let you complete the game out of sequence. After finishing the Necro-Industrialists, this one felt very familiar, and I remembered all the dashing and sliding and thumping moves, which definitely made it easier. I liked the first game, and this one doesn't stray too much from the formula, so I expect to like it as well. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Aqua Chamber (knowledge discovery, gameloop): Figure out the rules and secrets of this deadly water-filled place. Since it's a knowledge discovery game, I won't say much, just that it pleasantly surprised me after a rough first impression. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Blackwood's Dilemma (detective, story-rich): When a woman is accused of witchcraft back in the 17th century, there is little to say in her defence. Here's where you come in: a detective determined to find the truth. Talk to the townfolk, find the real murder weapon, and try to convince the people that no witchcraft is involved. Very stylistic, story-rich, but the detective part is rather easy in the demo. (my playthrpugh)
  
• 👍 Bloom! (point&click, scary) A spooky point&click escape room very much like the Rusty Lake’s Cube games. Barricade the window, lock the door, then relax if you dare. It manages to capture the spirit of Rusty Lake games quite well. Short demo, with a few jump scares. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 CD-ROM (puzzle box, decoding): Find hidden codes to unlock CDs on a ’90s computer. Insert a new CD, open files, run programs, and attempt to decipher the code to unlock the next CD. This is a simple demo, but some hidden codes have not yet been used, which makes me question if the later levels will be a lot more interconnected. It’s good, though be aware that the default resolution on the Steam Deck makes it impossible to solve, with critical buttons cut off. (my playthrough)
  
• 😡 Clue: Murder By Death (I don’t get it): This seems to try to be the classic board game Clue, but as an isometric 3D adventure game. You select three characters, then explore the mansion, talking to the suspects, inspecting objects, and then making an accusation. But I don’t get it. All the dialog is skippable, and rightfully so, because there doesn’t seem to be anything useful said anyway, it’s all “I didn’t see anything”, and all the objects I inspected offer no useful information other than “it’s a painting”, “it’s a plate”. Perhaps it didn't make sense because the demo ends after just 8 minutes, and I didn’t get to explore most of the mansion and talk to many of the characters. But I really don’t get it. I just walk around with no clues in sight, then the game asks me to make an accusation. This is not how the Clue/Cluedo games work. Perhaps someone who understands it could enlighten me in the comments.
  
• 👍 A Color Theory (puzzle platformer, pathfinding): A weird little platformer with not-really-trolling mechanics. Each color behaves in different ways. Yellow is the target, blue is simple platforming, purple can just freefall in any direction, red kills, cyan is pushable… Most of the time, you are blue, and the goal is to get to the yellow flag, but just like some unexpected mechanics in Baba Is You, this can lead to weird levels. You start as a little blue character trying to get to the yellow flag, but sometimes you are the blue flag trying to get to the yellow character, or the blue walls around the level, or the purple spikes. Initially, I felt a few levels weren’t especially well‑designed, with solutions that were a bit too obvious. But after winning every level, you unlock the bonus Orange color, a new target to collect before winning, which complicates all the levels. It’s good. (my playthrough)
  
• 😐 Connected Clue (detective, adventure, RPG): Roleplay as a detective. It feels a lot like an RPG-Maker adventure, with a lot of walking and talking. And I mean a lot of talking. As you talk with people and inspect objects, you collect clues in the form of pieces of text that you must then use to explain your theories, like “the bank <was robbed>, the criminals were looking for <precious artifacts>, they had <guns>, <a guard> was shot”. Each of these statements must be backed up by a piece of evidence you collected. It’s too chatty for me, but do give it a try if you’re looking for a story-rich detective game. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 The Day I Became A Bird (cozy, adventure): A little puzzle adventure, a string of short quests and activities, like petting the dog, eating breakfast, riding the bicycle. Very easy, very varied, a cute adventure about young love. (my playthrough
  
• 🎉 DEG (logic, knowledge discovery): A giant game with changing rules that doesn't explain itself. It starts with small puzzles, leading you to discover that it’s using Nurikabe rules. But instead of the puzzles being standalone, once you solve an area, it remains in place with a new area popping up right next to it, sharing its tiles. It’s surprising how well all the puzzle areas fit together. And it has all the modern tools expected in a hard logic puzzle: markers, free note drawing, undo, and redo. And later on, the game changes, with areas with different rules; it’s not all just Nurikabe. The only thing that’s missing right now is support for the Steam Deck. (my playthrough
  
• 👎 Echoes of the Cave (code breaking, third-person adventure): Escape from a cave by placing the correct symbols on an altar. The demo does a poor job of making the game interesting. It only has a handful of levels, all trivial, and most of the time is spent running around carrying the symbols through the cave. It barely hints in the last two levels that it could, if done well, be focused on figuring out the code. But instead of applying my own wishful imagination to what the game could be, the actual demo is just boring: pick up symbols, carry them to the target, place them down, repeat 2-4 times. (my playthrough)
  
• 😐 Elfgineer (factory builder): It's time to bring automation into Santa's shop to achieve maximum efficiency! A factory builder with the usual stuff: moving belts, inputs and outputs, production quotas, machines that change stuff, and unlockable skill trees. It’s a bit buggy, and almost impossible to control on the Steam Deck, but if you’re looking for a festive factory builder, feel free to give this one a try. (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Fail Fail Succeed (puzzle platformer): A clever puzzle platformer in which you must use failed attempts to your advantage. Each level is impossible at first, but you can collect a few orbs that will cause a block to appear from your body when you die. You start with a simple block. You can leave this behind when stepping on spikes, making a safe spot for your next walk over the spikes. There are movable ice blocks, bouncy rubber blocks, and crumbling sand blocks. You must figure out the right order and the right place for each of these orbs, plotting a course through the level that will let you get back to the dog. Oh yes, there's a portal spawning dog that you must pet, and sometimes a little bird you must free from its cage. Lovely, but also very challenging. (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Ghost Golfing (puzzle golf): A puzzle game pretending to be about golf. The goal is to get the ball to the hole using one or two strokes, but it’s all on a grid full of obstacles. The challenge is to place a few bumpers that deflect the ball’s path. Other than simple paths through plain fields, there are a lot more mechanics: ice, fire, sand, water, teleporters, wind… It feels a lot like Plungeroo, and a little like Golf Peaks, two games I really like, so it’s highly recommended.
  
• 👍 GraviChess (platformer, chesslike): Chess with gravity, a mix of realtime and grid-based movement. You control one chess piece navigating a platformer-like level. Normally, you can move left-right, jump a little bit, and fall from platforms. But you can also activate your chess powers and make a big instant jump. And you can switch which piece you are, to sneak up on a queen as a knight, or only move a little bit as a king, or stride across quickly as a rook. The goal is to capture all the enemy pieces and then reach the exit. It’s good, interesting levels, it’s got a pause mode to help you perform careful moves while falling, good controls… (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Hoppin: Into the Woods (pathfinding, sliding, logic): Help the rabbit collect all the carrots, sliding from log to log. Except that sometimes the levels are unsolvable and incomplete, and you must fill them in by placing stops in the right places. It’s quite good, I liked it. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 KAMI 2 (flood fill, stepping): A mobile game that's already 8 years old, finally coming to Steam. Being a mature game, it already feels polished and contains a lot of content. The goal is to change all the pieces to the same color, like in the classic Floodfill game. A long campaign, random levels, user levels, daily levels, and a lot of content for both simple relaxation and tough mental challenges. (a little bit of playthrough)
  
• 😐 The Lampkeeper (platformer, adventure, atmospheric): At first glance, this seems to be an easy platformer. Jump, double jump, glide. Turn on all the lamps, then go to the next level. It has a unique mood, black and white, dark and rainy. I’ve seen many things that don't make sense, making me believe that there may be deeper secrets hidden within. Or perhaps, as the store description says, it really is cozy, and the oddities are just oddities never meant to be touched. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Lead To Gold (solitaire): A challenging solitaire game with multiple variants (but only one included in the demo). There’s a table split into three areas: the target formulas, the deal/fusion area, and the storage/decrementing area. The goal is to create pairs matching the targets, either of equal value or of the same suit. Each deal fills in the missing spots in the fusion area. But during the deal, unfused cards in the fusion area combine into a new card, and all the cards in the storage area have their value reduced by one. You win when you clear all the targets; you lose when a card becomes negative. It’s good, mathy but not too mathy, with a bit of strategy (and luck) mixed in. (my lucky playthrough)
  
• 👍 A Little Less Desperation (point&click adventure, escape room): After trying to help an alien who turned out to be a thief, you are also imprisoned aboard a spaceship for aiding and abetting, and must now escape. Classic point&click adventure, funny, unexpected, weird, and quirky, fully voice-acted. But also classically minimalist, with no hotspot highlighting, barebones UI, and no hints. (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Mate'Morphosis (chess-like, stepping): Capture pieces on a chess board. But you become each piece you capture, so ask yourself if you can really afford to become a pawn, or you’d better leave that one alone for now, given that you only have very few turns to finish the level. Quite good, with more mechanics, including move bonuses and penalties you can collect, patrolling enemy pieces, and respawning pieces. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth (adventure): A cozy adventure set in the world of Moomintroll, a beloved children’s book character. This is just a short teaser that has one little adventure in which Moomintroll carries a hurt dog (wolf!) through a blizzard. Cute and cozy! (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Moon Garden Optimizer (strategy): A strategy farming game, plant the right plants to get to a stable oxygen-producing forest. Each turn, the plants produce and consume resources. The most important one is Water, which is in short supply and rarely produced in the garden, so the real goal is finishing the game before you run out of water. Energy allows you to plant and uproot your garden, but if you don’t use it in one turn, you lose it. Plants also interact with each other. For example, ivy makes energy depending on the number of surrounding trees, and palm trees make a lot of energy but destroy anything above them. The levels are tiny, just 5x5 grids, and sometimes it takes more than a turn to gather enough energy to plant anything, so it’s a puzzle, slow and deliberate, and not at all a farming simulator. Plenty of designed challenge levels called “scenarios”, plus random games and daily challenges. (my playthrough)
  
• 😐 Pip's Potion Shop (adventure, cooking simulator): After being a loyal renter for so many years, your landlord receives an offer he can’t refuse and has to kick you out. Unless you can come up with the money to buy the land yourself in less than a week. Brew magic potions for your exotic customers, each according to their taste. I’m not sure if this will be an entirely basic cooking simulator or if the full game will be a bit more complex, but the demo is rather straightforward. Each client requests a potion with a desired effect, with their desired taste, on a scale from extra bitter to extra sweet. The first ingredients you put in determine what the potion does (health, mana, flight…), but then you can just add a whole bunch of extra ingredients to alter the taste. Which is totally unrealistic, I doubt that a health potion with 10 spoons of salt is still a health potion, that also happens to taste extra bitter. And to get enough money to buy the land, you just need to sell about 15 potions? And after many years, you didn’t manage to sell 15 potions, but you’ll do that in 5 days? Given that there are walking golems and talking cats, a bit of suspension of disbelief is OK. It’s got interesting characters, a nice family, and for a casual cooking simulator, it’s fine. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Pit Pioneers (lemmings): A new take on Lemmings, dig deep to find the cause of the recent earthquakes. You have a bunch of diggers, all moving nonstop until you give them a job to do, even if that means falling to their deaths. “I’m not a fan of fast‑paced games where you have to micromanage a chaotic crew, so I didn’t play much of it, but it does seem well-made. (my short playthrough)
  
• 👍 Re-Activated (programming platformer): Program a robot moving automatically to reach the exit. And by ‘program,’ I mean simple logic: you just match conditions to actions—if there’s a gap, jump; if there’s an obstacle, turn around; if you see light, go to sleep. It’s just 2-4 conditions and an equal number of actions in every level, so it should be simple. And it’s not all automatic; you also have full control of a drone that can interact with the environment, pushing buttons at the right time, which actually makes the game interesting. Quite good, I liked it. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Secrets of Velendar Castle - Escape Room (environmental puzzles, escape room): An escape‑room style game driven by nonverbal environmental puzzles. I really enjoyed the puzzles. The cryptic clues demand lateral thinking, and part of the challenge is deciding how each of the new bits of information fits and which puzzle you can tackle next. There are also helpful hints if you get stuck. (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Servant of the Lake (point&click adventure): A new puzzle from the Rusty Lake team, this time set around the beginning of the Vanderboom story. You’ve just been hired as a temporary servant on their estate, and your first task is to assist Mr. Aldous’s morning routine: prepare his breakfast, wake him up, feed him, and get him dressed. A lovely new addition to the saga, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it all began (hopefully). (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Snow Cone: The Inside Scoop (sokoban, story rich): Updated demo, now with a less intrusive tutorial and a lot more story. Prepare the perfect snow cone by rolling snowballs and scooping them up. This feels a lot like A Good Snowman, except that instead of building snowpeople on the ground, you must scoop up the balls into your cone. Rolling a ball over unpacked snow makes it bigger, and you have a specific target to build, like four balls of size one on top of each other, or a 4-3-2-1 sequence, or any other sequence the puzzle may require. There are many other mechanics to discover, including movable boxes, slippery ice, and sinking water. Speak to each customer and discover their stories, which somehow put you in the middle of an active police investigation of organized crime. Lovely game, story-rich, but with very challenging levels. (my playthrough)
  
• 😞 SwitchTrack (rhythm, action): An action/rhythm game, not a puzzle, you have to keep moving track segments between different rails to keep wagons from falling. It’s turn-based, and at least in the few levels I played, it’s not too fast. Not my style, but it seems good enough for what it is. (my short playthrough)
  
• 👍 Tiles of Grimmwoods (deckbuilding, strategy, roguelike): Survive the Grimm forest, battling witches and their minions using tiles from your deck of cards. As a roguelike, you go through runs, within a bifurcated network of stops, leading to a boss battle. As a deckbuilder, after each battle, you get to alter your deck. As a tile placement/block puzzle, the goal of each level is to place down tiles in a grid, a bit like a narrow, horizontal Tetris. And as a strategy game, you must prioritize the tile placement: do you put down a sword for yourself, even if it also activates an obstacle, or get some health bonus, or play it safe and just put down a simple path, or do you try to attack the enemy with lightning, or… It’s complicated in a good way, a strong entry in the maturing roguelike tile placement deckbuilders. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Trypophobia (logic): Copy the target image, not as it is now, but how it was before being transformed. Each level has three zones: the input, the transformation rules, and the target. You set up the input, then the transformations occur. The outcome must match the output. If, for example, the rules say that all reds turn blue, you must set all the input shapes that must be blue to red. Rules become increasingly complex, with several rules in a batch, and several batches of rules running in sequence. It’s a decent logic game, and a new idea (as far as I know). (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Uncle Lee’s Cookbook: Five Recipes for Disaster (point&click adventure): A point&click adventure, fully voiced, funny and thinky. The demo says “episode 4”, so I think this is somewhere in the middle of the full game. You start by arriving in your uncle’s childhood town, where it’s always Halloween season, but nobody seems to be around. You soon realize that when your uncle said that “everyone is at home”, that meant everyone is at YOUR home, hiding because there’s an infestation, not of rats, or raccoons, or lawyers, but of ghosts. Figure out who the ghosts are, what they want, fix the town’s problems, and maybe discover a bit of your own family history along the way. Quite chatty, and with tricky puzzles, so in almost an hour of my playthrough, I didn’t get too far in solving it, but I did have fun. (my playthrough)
  
• 😐 Wavekin (adventure, narrative, exploration): Explore a dying underwater civilization of fish-like creatures using song powers. It’s very beautiful, with lots of characters and a rich mythos, a lot of interesting creatures, and a unique gameplay: sing songs to interact with the characters. Just two words included in the demo, Hello and Follow, though I did accidentally discover a third one that isn’t acknowledged by the game. A unique experience, though I did encounter several bugs, one of which completely broke my first run. (my playthrough)

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