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

Brainrack, Issue #319 (June 13, 2025)

Welcome once again to our weekly newsletter with puzzle game news, new and upcoming releases, giveaways, deals and bundles, spotlight on a lesser-known or forgotten game, and other stuff.

Greetings to those who’ve joined since last week! If you found us through a link to the newsletter, read the group overview to see what else we can offer, visit the forum for puzzle discussion, follow our curator for reviews and recommendations, check out our Basic Functionality and Accessibility Guide on how to improve your games, and tell your friends if you like what you see. Thanks!

The June edition of Steam NextFest is on, with many hundreds of demos to try out.

Steam added more support for discovering accessibility features in games, showing details like audio settings, camera customization, input support, subtitles and text reader, and many others, both on store pages and when searching. Read the official announcement for more details.

Ideally, every group member would follow our curator and vice versa, but until then, here's the changelog. And don't forget our many lists based on themes and subgenres.

New curatees with full reviews:[/b]

• Akuro & Bahaku 1: Jungle Adventure (point&click, hidden object)
  
• Gaslamp Cases 4: The Arcane Village (match 3)

New curatees with mini-reviews:

• Blasted Dice (dice)
  
• Finding Pots & Pets (hidden object)
  
• Scarred Mansion (strategy)

Please let us know in the Curator Info thread if you'd like to write mini-reviews (max. 200 characters, positive or negative) for puzzlers that aren't curated by us yet. Examples and inspiration can be found on the Group Member Recommendations list.

The giveaways are on SteamGifts, but no need to create an account, just visit the site and log in through Steam. Good luck!

Sweet Home 3: Look and Find Collector's Edition[www.steamgifts.com] is available for everybody, and Hexeract[www.steamgifts.com] only for group members, courtesy of the developers.

Got your own puzzler, adventure, demo, or some new content coming out on mobile or PC? Let us know in the forum or by adding sdumitriu on Steam Chat.

Free Game Highlights:

• Dreamland (adventure)
  
• The Final Print (detective)
  
• Felt Mansion (RPG, exploration)
  
• Future Cowboy (visual novel)
  
• InspoQuest (platformer)
  
• Katharsi (adventure)
  
• Mr. Photographer - Into The Light (platformer)
  
• OH？ME (point&click)
  
• Phase Cross (logic, nonogram)
  
• Prism (platformer)
  
• Spectacle: Worlds Unseen (adventure)

Paid Games - Now Free:

• Deep Despair 3[freebies.indiegala.com] (adventure)
  
• Paradox Soul (adventure) — Free until Jun 17th

New content:

D3AD HAND more than doubled in size with a new chapter called R3D STAR. Replicube now has a puzzle of the week feature. A new DLC for Serial Cleaner was released, Blood & Confetti. Wildrise added more levels and a new difficulty choice.

New demos:

After playing all the demos in the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase, and with around a hundred new demos added for Steam Next Fest, I’m falling behind with the demo reviews. This is a list of just a few demos from the past two weeks; I’ll catch up with the rest soon. The demo of the week is Threadbound. You should read my article reviewing every demo in the CPS on on ThinkyGames[thinkygames.com].

• BroomSweeper (roguelike minesweeper): Minesweeper with long runs. Each day you have to clean a few floors, each with a few rooms. Some of the rooms have minesweeper levels, some have free items, and some have vending machines with various power-ups. The more rooms you solve, the more power-ups you can obtain/buy, but the more dust bunnies (mines) you’ll have. The real goal is to solve the boss room on each floor. Interesting extra mechanics on top of regular minesweeper, like superbunnies that increase the mine counters in a 5x5 area, multiple bunnies in the same tile, special bunny formations, and power-ups like ignoring the first fail, bigger health, more coins for a successful sweep, etc. Nice, the only thing I dislike is that quite often you’re forced to guess. That’s why you have a health bar instead of instant fail, right?
  
• Chromatic Conundrum (test chambers): 3D puzzle game in which you have to use colored flashlights to trigger sensors that move platforms and open doors. You have flashlights with RGB and combinations of them and RGB sensors, so you must point the right light on each sensor. Interesting puzzles in the demo, though a bit easy.
  
• Code: Loopbreaker Demo - Escape Room (escape room adventure): A more realistic escape room game. You play as an IT technician being called to work on the weekend because someone's computer doesn't work properly. The first few tasks are very mundane: figure out the combination to your own lock, figure out a coworker’s password, and figure out which number to use for a badge. Then it gets more abstract, with puzzles without instructions where you have to guess what the puzzle wants from you. I feel that the puzzles are too underclued, but otherwise the game has good production value.
  
• DISCOPUP (point&click): Demo crashes after the first minute of play. Point&click adventure: try to make your way into a disco.
  
• Drawn Tale (scary escape room): Escape room game taking place in the subconscious, in two parallel instances of a house. Intentionally bad graphics, hard to see things, scary, unclear objectives—you have to click on things that are mostly unhighlighted. Untranslated Russian in some places.
  
• FIND ALL 8: The Road to the Maya (hidden object): Find all items of the same kind, three kinds at a time, in a big picture. Good variety of objects and hints; every item you find gets colored, and once you find all the hidden objects in an area, the whole area gets colored and animated.
  
• Glow Cubes (Rubik’s cube variants): A virtual Rubik’s Cube with many variants. Besides the classic twisting cube, there’s a sliding version like a 3D 15-puzzle, slide+twist, and twist around the selected cubie instead of twisting around the face center, mostly in both 2x2x2 and 3x3x3 versions. And there are also some other bonus cubes, but I’m not good enough at solving such puzzles to unlock them. Basic implementation, a kind of crowded UI, but it does the job well enough for what it is.
  
• Memoria Altera (first-person escape room, adventure): Trivial and boring puzzles, lots of walking, a bad story that gives itself too much importance with lots of “mysterious” flashbacks, and bad graphics.
  
• Murder at Ironwood Inn (detective): A more realistic detective game in which you have to interrogate people by asking the right questions in the right way. You will get different answers if you ask the same question charismatically, directly, or methodically. You can play with different detectives, each with their own personalities and skills, and that also influences the answers. And you unlock new questions if you discover evidence. The biggest problem is that there is a very strict time limit, and if you fail to gather enough evidence to sustain your accusation, you’ll fail the case. There are some UI/UX issues as well, but in theory the game concept seems interesting and new.
  
• Nonogram Nonsense (nonogram): A basic nonogram, not as good in terms of QoL as others I’ve seen, but one nice thing about it is that it can display either as a standard grid of black&white cells, or as a yarn cross-stitch.
  
• ODDLI: A satisfying game (pathfinding, cube rolling): Roll a shape to a flag on a square grid. Once you do that, do it again a few more times for other shapes to other flags, but each subsequent one must move around the already moving shapes, avoiding collisions. The first time you do, though it seems trivial, when there are 10 other shapes to avoid, you may find you have locked yourself out of any viable option and have to restart from scratch and use more efficient routes. Then later levels add one more constraint: every path must also include a specific sequence of 3 moves, like up, left, and left, in order to gain all the stars for the level. The demo has only 1x1x1 and 2x1x1 shapes; I wonder if the full game will have more. Nice concept, but one thing I don’t like is that it’s slow; after every path, you must wait for the shape to roll back to the start.
  
• Project Arrow (platformer): A platformer in which you can shoot arrows to hit buttons, cut ropes, or pop balloons. Not that much of a puzzle game since figuring out what to do is quite obvious, but more of a timing platformer since you have to wind up the bow for a precise amount in order for the arrow to hit the target at the right time. Still, a decent platformer if you enjoy the genre.
  
• Sophie in the Tangled World (topology, adventure): The game itself is an adventure/mystery; you play as Sophie, a young girl that follows a strange firefly into an alternate world that looks just like her Paris but is almost completely empty. The puzzle part consists of following a path with a rope so that it hooks around an obstacle if the rope is white, or it doesn’t if it’s black. Two things make this challenging: sometimes you have two different characters moving in sync, and you have to make sure they satisfy their own rope color, and the world is not following normal geometry, but it loops around, and there are wormholes. But the game is very, very slow. I wish there was a “Run” button.
  
• Threadbound (puzzle platformer): A smart puzzle platformer with a story. The thinky part is that you can link coordinates between you, boxes, and platforms, so, for example, when a box is falling, it pushes you to the left, or when you move one box horizontally, it moves an elevator up and down. Clever puzzles, good-looking, intriguing story—looks like a good game!
  
• Unbox the Room (cozy, decoration): Just get items out of boxes and drop them wherever you want; it doesn’t seem to matter what you do, so you can play it as a simple room decoration game, but it fails at that too.

There are very few releases this week since it’s a NextFest week.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3176050/Cantaloupe_Chronicle/

A mystery point&click game. The demo didn’t impress me, but take a look; maybe it’s something you’d like.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2421950/The_Guardian_of_Nature/

This is just the first chapter, released in Early Access, so treat it more like a demo. A nice point-and-click/side-scrolling adventure game in which you explore the forest as a guardian of nature, gathering items and fixing things. You discover that a bunch of giant gatherers are chopping down the forest, and you set out to stop them, and that’s where the game ends for now. Nice graphics, collectible story fragments, and fast travel between already discovered screens—it looks like a good cozy game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3678870/Happy_Nuclear/

A short logic game in which you have to figure out a spy story based on surveillance evidence. In each house you have a list of connected rooms and 6 people that must move to an adjacent room every hour. The surveillance logs show who was in each room at every hour, and you have to follow the people to figure out who is part of the conspiracy: the traitor is whoever was alone with the spy in the same room, the thief is whoever never met anyone else, the accomplices passed the stolen documents between themselves whenever the data holder was alone with another person, etc. But there are gaps in the surveillance logs; sometimes you don’t know who was in a room, or you have rooms with no surveillance so you don’t know who is in them, so you have to reconstruct everybody’s movements across time and rooms. Only 6 levels, getting progressively harder, but I had fun while it lasted. Replays are randomized, and you get a score based on the time you took on each level, so you can play it again to try to get a better score, especially if you find a better strategy than just meticulously tracing everything.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3469270/IINTWO/

Puzzle platformer in which you play as a soul taking control of cubes to move them.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2871440/Squeakross_Home_Squeak_Home/

Good nonogram with a cozy theme; solve levels to receive clothing, furniture, and other decorations, and build Squeaky’s new house. Customize your rat. Receive email (including pretend spam and phishing emails) and a lot of things to do other than solving puzzles, if you wish to. Very good QoL with lots of settings.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3459590/TETRAs_Escape_2/

A good puzzle pseudo-platformer in which you have to build your way by turning characters into the right shape. Collect 3 stars and a trophy, then reach the exit, using a few moving blocks that can morph into different tetromino shapes. Feels a lot like Blocks That Matter, except that you control the movement of the characters, and instead of dropping static blocks, you transform characters into blocks.

Highlighting the best release of last week, at least according to the curator’s opinion.

I didn’t have that much time to play games last week, but I did really enjoy solving Bloxpath levels. It’s split into many areas, each with a few levels centered around a theme, like multiple layers, asymmetric cubes moving at the same time, walls, portals that you can use, portals that you must avoid, and many others. Good QoL, good quality, and very captivating levels.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3249900/Bloxpath/

Highlighting a short and free puzzle game every week!

This is a daily logic grid puzzle in which you must solve a crime. Given lists of suspects, weapons, and locations, plus a few clues tying them together, solve the triple cross grids that pair up each suspect with a weapon in a room, and figure out who did the crime. There are also more flavorful clues like encoded texts, fingerprints, zodiac signs, heights and weights, and materials for the weapons, so that very few clues are straightforward, like “X was in room A,” but something you have to work to decipher. Each day has a new puzzle, and there are also books and a board game you can buy if you need more than one puzzle a day. Works in a browser, even on a phone.

Highlighting another free puzzle game every week!

Remember Shackle from a month ago? This is the sequel, bigger and harder, in which not only are you tied to a ball, but it’s Halloween and you’re scared of the dark, so you must make sure you’re always close to a light. Very hard levels, assuming that you’re already familiar with the rules of Shackle. Works in a browser, but not on a phone.

Puzzler screenshots are mostly for providing hints or solutions, but they can still be beautiful, funny, or some other adjective, so post yours in the Screenshots thread on the forum, include a caption if you want, and we might put it in one of the next issues. No spoilers, please!

Blue Prince is a unique type of game that takes many, many hours to complete, if there even is such a thing as completing it. It’s a roguelike game; every “day” you must build a house room by room, trying to get to the 46th room, but there are so many other things to do along the way that trying to get to the 46th room shouldn't even be a goal—just live in the moment and enjoy the ride. Puzzles, harder puzzles, cryptic puzzles, exploration, discoveries, trophies, and hard achievements. And sometimes you can get so close to one only to end up frustrated.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3497223427

You can always check our curator for curated titles on sale. Specials on the front page is incomplete; click the Discounts tab for more.

An underrated hidden gem. A 3D exploratory collectathon, you roam the world trying to collect fruits. While you can freely move around with your Roomba-like character, it doesn’t count unless you can build a continuous trail of blocks behind you, all the way from a checkpoint to a fruit, a door, a letter, or one of many other special things you can find. While it sounds simple, it often requires creativity to find a way to build a path, given the restrictions that you can’t build farther than one block away, even vertically. There are very creative environments and a lot of unique activities/side quests. It is a bit hard to control and could use a better tutorial, but otherwise it’s a great, fun game that anyone can enjoy, especially since 100% completion isn’t required; just do your best to get to the next checkpoint.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1550270/Togges/

Not to be confused with our Deal of the Week, which is just an especially good deal from the weeklies. Every week we'll pick a puzzler we really like and try to push it down everyone's throats. But with love because it's so good. Or highlight a lesser-known title that's unlikely to get curated. Comment below if you'd like to write about an undeservedly forgotten game for next time!

Voxelgram is THE 3D nonogram on Steam, with thousands of levels to play, great quality and accessibility, no-guess unique solutions, and nice dioramas when completing levels. While not a true nonogram, since it doesn’t list the length of each sub-segment, the unique way in which it clues its cells makes it more challenging but still entirely solvable with a bit of patience, especially since it has many optional helper tools. There’s a 2-color sequel coming up, which will offer 2-color variants of the Voxelgram 1 levels if you own both games, so now’s the time to buy this on a discount.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1158470/Voxelgram/

Show the world how good (or bad) you are at puzzle games by submitting your Workshop levels, guides, walkthroughs, mods, artwork inspired by a puzzler, or whatever, even if it's not a game curated by us, in this forum thread or below in the comments to be featured here next time.

Innocentive’s guide for Bonfire Peaks Lost Memories DLC part 1.

Here are a few quick & easy ways you can help us out. A little can go a long way; otherwise, we'll never achieve world domination.

• Feedback is important, so let us know what you like or don't like.
  
• Follow our curator and get notified about new additions and reviews.
  
• Tell your puzzle- and/or adventure-loving friends and your favorite developers about us and our Basic Functionality and Accessibility Guide.