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

Brainrack, Issue #364: Week of April 20, 2026 (part 1)

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, join the No Clue Discord server[discord.gg], 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!

There is no official Steam event this week, but the Fake OS sale has a bunch of good games on sale and good demos to try. In other Steam-related news, while the Steam Machine and Steam Frame are still some time away, the Steam Controller will be available for purchase in two weeks.

I forgot to mention it last week, but Stephen's Sausage Roll turned 10 years old! Many others and I consider it one of the most important puzzle games, ushering in a new era of modern puzzle games focused on excellent puzzle design. To celebrate the occasion, there was an interview with Stephen on the Draknek & Friends podcast, and Thinky Games’ Joe played and talked about it for a bit.

We are also considering a possible change in how our newsletter is shared. Group announcements are easy to miss, and the newsletters are often too long to fit within a single post (like this one). Unfortunately, they also don’t fit naturally in the “Friends Activity” stream. In addition, we’ve encountered some technical issues with announcements, and there appears to be an upcoming limit on how many can be posted. To address this, we are considering a dedicated forum category within our Group Discussions and permanently moving the newsletter there, and at least for a while posting a link to it as an announcement. We would welcome your feedback on this potential change.

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:

• Hidden Sheep Puzzle (hidden object)
  
• Slugtrip (sokoban)
  
• Unknown - Foggins (adventure)

New Curatees with Mini-Reviews:

• Homgard (logic)
  
• Qoob (logic)

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!

Both Pushmania[www.steamgifts.com] and Royal Card Clash[www.steamgifts.com] are available only for our group members, courtesy of the developers.


https://store.steampowered.com/app/3374460/Causal_Loop/

Explore an alien planet with timelooped clones of yourself. Certain spots let you record a short “movie”, then that clone keeps playing over and over again, allowing you to, for example, cross a bridge that only appears while the button is pressed. The levels are very 3D, with temporary bridges and teleportation jumps between different areas, making it challenging to determine the exact layout of the levels. Quick and precise platforming is sometimes required when you need to carry a "key" from one location to another before it explodes, though it seems to be lenient enough for those of us who prefer to take things slowly and think before moving.

This is one of the most high-production-value puzzle games I’ve played. Or, conversely, this is the most thinky AAA-looking game. The demo, back when I played it, was a bit disappointing, starting with some boring tutorial levels and just a little peek at the actual alien world and story, but the full game is very story-rich. It starts slowly, with lots of dialogue and a very cinematic environment. The story is intriguing, and the puzzles are well-designed, with a gentle difficulty curve. Highly recommended, especially for those that don’t usually play puzzle games, it may be another “gateway drug” like Portal was twenty years ago, introducing more people to thinky games.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3987250/Factory_95/

A factory building game about making PowerPoint slides. Add elements on a page, mix in colors, and carry the outcome on conveyor belts all the way to the outbox. A classic Windows 95 presentation, mixed in with a simple story conveyed through emails. It’s got a lot of the features that make a good Zach-like game, except for the scores and histograms that evaluate how good your solution is. It starts easy, but as the requirements become increasingly complex, you soon hit the bottleneck of a brute force approach: there aren’t enough connections between the rooms to carry everything on its own conveyor belt. Normally, each subsequent “product” is a slight variation of the one before it, but if you keep tweaking the previous solution, you’ll hit a dead end, and a complete wipe of the factory can make it workable again. Well, at least for a while. It’s good, I like it.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4460470/Factory_Balls_Go/

Bart Bonte brings back the Flash era favorite puzzle game Factory Balls, with 100 new levels. The old mechanics are back, but some new ones show up as well. While I enjoyed figuring out the puzzles, as a mobile-first game, it has its limitations: very few settings, no close button, and some slow-ish animations that are really irking my impatient self. Oh, in case you don’t know, this is a game in which you have to reproduce a target ball by dunking it in paint, covering it up with various objects like masks, hats, glasses, and belts, and dunking again until you get all the right patches of colors.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4542250/GRID_CRYPT/

A logical dungeon crawler, figure out each monster’s patterns and exploit their weaknesses. In theory, you have a series of connected rooms, go in, try to kill the monsters, and go out to the next floor. But the game becomes impossible after the first few rooms, and there’s nowhere near a hundred monsters to kill to earn the kill-100-monsters achievement. And that’s not even the final number of monsters to kill! So, where is everyone else? And how can you kill the monster that’s all alone in an isolated room with no way to get in there? There’s a hidden layer in this game. I was just about to dismiss this as a simple dungeon crawler, but I’m glad I played more than just a handful of levels. There’s a lot to like in this game, once you start figuring out its secrets. I’d like to say more about it, but that would spoil the fun of discovering it on your own. It’s very cheap, so give it a try.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3941010/Network_Notation/

Hack into a network in a thinky race against enemy defences. Each level is a graph of nodes connected by edges, with you starting in one of the nodes, and a few target nodes you must conquer. You expand node by node across connections, with each action taking some time and resources. You have a starting number of “workers”, your power, with each worker being able to maintain a conquered node, attack a new node, or defend an attacked node. There may be defense agents as well, trying to attack you once they are alerted to your intrusion, so you have to plan your strategy for each level well: do you attack quickly before the enemy reaches you, do you conquer the enemies first, do you go for compute nodes that will give you more workers, do you trigger the alarm early for a chance to win before the enemy gets to you or silently creep towards the goal on a slower route? You also get points for speed, number of conquered nodes, and the raised alarm level, so you may try different strategies to maximize your score. And with these points, you buy upgrades, like faster hacking speed, or more starting power, or delayed intrusion detection. You can re-assign points before each level, so part of the strategy is also figuring out if a level benefits from different upgrades. And once you become more powerful, you can retry earlier levels to improve your score and get more points for more upgrades. On one hand, this is good, it encourages replay and experimentation, but on the other hand, having to replay the same level repeatedly for marginal improvements might seem boring. But there’s another trick that makes replaying levels worthwhile: as you progress through the game, you unlock “modifiers” that let you increase the difficulty of the levels and exponentially increase the rewards for beating a level. You can make the enemies more powerful, or more alert, or make it more costly to occupy nodes, or any combination of 8 different metrics, for up to 256 times the number of points. Anyway, it’s good, I like it.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3565040/Rumbral/

An atmospheric puzzle platformer like Limbo, explore a seemingly deserted world. The goal is to keep moving to the right, jumping and crouching over obstacles, flipping switches, and moving boxes to help you jump over taller obstacles. And there’s a red goo that transports you between two different timelines when you step in it.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2162800/shapez_2__Factory/

Out of Early Access. Shapez 2 is the 3D sequel to the popular abstract factory builder. Extract, process, transform, and combine shapes into the required products. Like the original shapez and most other factory builders, this focuses more on scale and throughput than on puzzles. While I enjoy building the assemblies that create all the complicated shapes, I can’t stand the need to wait for hundreds of copies of the same shape to be created, and I don’t want to copy the same machine 20 times just to make it go faster. Still, the game has a lot to offer, with many mods available in the workshop, including one that actually speeds up the game, making the waiting part irrelevant! Hurray!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2364580/Titanium_Court/

A multigenre game like no other. It’s a Match3 game: swap and merge items to remove them from the board, with new ones falling from the top. It’s a tower defense game: after the merge phase ends, your faeries attack the enemy castles, and the enemy attacks your castle. It’s a strategy game: you only have a small number of merges to do before the TD phase starts, and you need to figure out what you should merge: collect resources when you merge fields, forests, rivers and mountains, destroy the enemy when you merge their castles, or keep them around so you can plunder for gold, keep mountains or rivers around your castle to protect it from attacks, keep shops and treasure chests… It’s a roguelite: you choose which fights to fight on a run against the dragon, and you get to unlock and choose semi-permanent upgrades that make battles easier. It’s a very funny, story-rich, mystery adventure game: between runs you explore the castle, talk to your faerie subjects, ponder about your situation while taking match3 showers… And it blends everything really well. The match3 is smart and meaningful, the strategy is deep, and the story and humor are really well done.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3677140/Whispers_of_the_Hourglass/

A strange 3D puzzle adventure where you solve puzzles to collect clues that help you solve even more puzzles. The clues come in the form of poems, but you don’t know which puzzle each poem refers to or how to map the cryptic poem to the actual puzzle elements. I liked that aspect, though I didn’t enjoy how the puzzles are scattered through an otherwise crowded world full of decorative objects, turning it into a hunt for the real puzzles. Still, it’s a good new idea.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3126790/Wordban_a_textbased_Sokoban_game/

A game like Baba Is You, in which objects in the world follow the rules written in the world, but instead of Subject-Verb-Object sentences, the rules are transformations, or find-and-replace rules. For example, when there are three “Book” blocks on top of each other, replace them with a “Shelf” block, or when there’s a “Car” block with a space to its right, move the “Car” to the right. Each turn, all the rules are evaluated and applied, changing the layout of the level, and each level has its own rules. The levels do somewhat tell a story. Unlike Baba, which had the same specific objects throughout the entire game, in Wordban, you can have any object-word that makes sense for the story: balloons, doors, furniture, toys, or just letters. Plus, of course, one or more (or even zero) red circles that are the avatar you can control. While you can’t make as many contraptions as you could in Baba, there are still a lot of wildly different level ideas in Wordban, from simple box-pushing to setting up complicated Game of Life automated machines. It’s good, give it a try if you liked Baba Is You.

And the Rest:

• All or Nothing (pattern recognition, fast paced): Given a set of cards with shapes on them, find 3 that are either all the same or all different in every one of the four characteristics: type of shape, number of shapes, color, fill pattern. Not quite a puzzle, more like a focus, spot the difference training tool, but it’s good.
  
  
• Artifact - 3D puzzle (3D jigsaw): Reconstruct broken artifacts by placing each shard in the right place.
  
  
• Binairo - Takuzu (logic): A logic game, known as either Binairo ot Takuzu: fill in a grid with 0 and 1, so that there are no 3 consecutive zeroes or ones in a row/column, and there are no two identical rows/columns. Minimalist implementation, random and daily levels.
  
  
• Capture The Mouse (strategy, logic): Place obstacles on a grid to block the mouse from escaping.
  
  
• Cross Math - Logic Number Puzzle (math): A basic CrossMath implementation, fill in the missing numbers in a crossword-like grid to make all the equations correct.
  
  
• Gridlock (block placement puzzle, score challenge, free): A block placement puzzle, place blocks in a grid, clear rows, columns, and sub-squares when they’re full. Most games of this type are arcade, with infinite, randomized blocks, but this is a “daily competition” variant in which the sequence of blocks is predefined for each day, and you have to try to get the highest score for the day among all players. Simple, minimalist, but that’s expected for this type of game.
  
  
• Pieces (cute, point&click, adventure, minigames, free): A free game about coping with emotions in everyday life.
  
  
• Plantiquarian (3D, collectathon, adventure, free): Find, identify, and collect plants. Explore a colorful world full of quirky plants and creatures. Figure out how to collect each plant.
  
  
• Puzzle Bobble Everybubble! (bubble shooter, action, PvP): A colorful bubble shooter you can play alone or against friends.
  
  
• Sophie's Grids (logic, speed solving, free): Given a grid of dice with random numbers on top, flip rows or columns until they all end up with 6 facing up. It’s not too complex. After a few games, I got a basic algorithm for solving it, so the game focuses more on speed-solving and blindsolving, with achievements for solving a level in sub-second times. There are also variants, with dice that spin twice as fast or half as fast as normal dice, or locks that keep a die in place for an extra turn, pegs that prevent one side from going up. And there are different modes as well, random, predefined challenges, drill, and nodes (no idea what the last two do yet, since they are locked). Nice and simple, and it’s free.
  
  
• Spudtrap (puzzle platformer): A gameboy-like game, push or destroy boxes to traverse levels and destroy the enemies. There are two characters you can control, helping each other.
  
  
• Symetria (geometry, math, educational): A math challenge game, given a 2D geometric figure, draw it transformed in some way: reflected, mirrored, scaled… Not really a game, more of a training tool.

And a heads up for the games covered in the next newsletter: Who Summoned It?, a lovely detective game in a fairytale land[/url] Wavekin, an aquatic adventure/exploration game with strange alien creatures; Homgard, an excellent nonogram with new mechanics and a very rich story; No Stone Unturned, a detective/adventure game with animals; Puzzle ATLAS, a collection of logic puzzles and riddles; GRIDBUSTERS, a logic deduction game with a story; CD-ROM, a steganography puzzle game about finding hidden codes in old CDs; and on Monday, a surprise release from the studio formerly known as Zachtronics, U.V.S. Nirmana, an engineering zach-like with, of course, a new solitaire embedded.

If you have 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:

• Chyma and the Toll of Time (platformer)
  
• Drowned Caves (exploration)
  
• Gridlock (strategy)
  
• Pieces (visual novel)
  
• Plantiquarian (exploration)
  
• Sophie's Grids (casual, stategy)

Paid Games - Now Free:

• Carlos the Taco[freebies.indiegala.com] (platformer)
  
• Macaron Mash (casual, platformer)

Highlighting a short and free puzzle game every week!

A daily game in which you have to find a path through a maze of letters that forms a quote. You are given the starting point, and you know that you must use all the letters and that the path will end somewhere on the edge of the grid. Once you solve it, you also get some info about the quote, who said it, and when. You also get a “library” with all the quotes you found in the past. Works in a browser, even on a phone.

Highlighting another free puzzle game every week!

A database dive game, similar to The Roottrees Are Dead, mixed with language deciphering. You receive a letter from Ludir, oloth-til of Oreleth-cyno-taayen of Trevosa, asking you to help identify the rightful heir to the throne. And no, I’m not having a seizure; you will have to figure out what those words mean. Search for documents, figure out the meaning of the strange words, and the relationships and titles of the 30 members of the royal family. Works in a browser, but not on a phone.

(continued in part 2)