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

Brainrack, Issue #312 (April 22, 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, posted on Tuesdays.

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 big event this week is the Box Pushing Fest, with lots of puzzle games on sale, or with new demos to try out. This coincides with many good demos and good new releases. A couple other events are StrateGems with strategy games, and Ultimate Board Game Sale with board games.

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:

• A Twisted Tale (point&click, adventure)
  
• Ligo (sokoban)

New curatees with mini-reviews:

• Pushmania (sokoban)

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!

Tescaris - A Soothing Cute Puzzle Game[www.steamgifts.com] is available for everybody, and The Cable Guy[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:

• Aliya's Awakening: DOGE 2042 (detective)
  
• Cube Lab (indie)
  
• Forgetmenots (side scroller)
  
• Project: ICARUS (time management)

New content:

Munchy Mammals added a level editor, and there’s a level design competition for it. Snakeloop has 60 more “official” levels in the workshop. And for the ongoing boxpushing fest, lots of demos have been updated.

New demos:

The demo of the week is Snowmelt Manor, but all of the ones are great.

• Cats Catching Mice: The Black and White World (puzzle platformer, metroidvania): A metroidvania that reminds me a lot of Animal Well. You play as a cat trying to catch mice and fight giant bugs. Jump, use tools, pounce on crabs and bats and other small but deadly critters, scare mice then trap them and collect their souls. Use these souls to buy tools you can always summon: box, spring, balloon, fan, ball. From time to time you have to fight big bugs that take a lot of hits, and each such fight is slightly different: you have to jump on top of some, throw spears, push a hard to reach button, drop boxes… And there are also lots of hidden collectibles that you must look out for hidden inside walls. Nice game, but I wish the CRT effect was optional, and I encountered a softlocking bug.
  
• Celestial Sokoban (sokoban): Sokoban, but instead of a 2D square grid, you play on a grid made of connected concentric circles, pushing stars along the edges. This is interesting, there are a lot more “corners” and “edges” possible in a graph. Like in a good sokoban, you have to plan ahead the order in which you push the stars in their place, but the unfamiliar topology makes the solving process a lot more deliberate. I like this. However, there is no undo, the movement is a bit too slow, and it’s a bit buggy. Also, no settings, no quit button, no fullscreen.
  
• Club Soko (pathfinding, box pushing): Clob Soko is the hottest club in town, full of people, bouncers and equipment. However, you're not here to dance, but to get deeper and deeper into the club and leave your name on every hidden wall. Cleverly push people around to outsmart the bouncers who keep you away from the doors. Cute, but rather simple levels in the demo, using the strong theme in good ways.
  
• Dragon Riddler (word game, roguelite, strategy): Make words to fight enemies. Each “level” consists of two stages, finding your way to the dragon’s cave, and fighting the dragon. In the former, the letter grid is also the world map, and as you make words, the letters are consumed and the rest of the cells in each row slide left toward your position, and among the letters there are special cells you must crack: enemies that attack you, mountains that block the row, or treasure. The dragon fight features a smaller grid of letters, and both you and the dragon form words, and each pair of letters deals damage to one of you, depending on which side is worth more points. Like in scrabble, letters have a value, with more uncommon letters worth more points, and the length and total score of each word you form determines what you gain from it. There are 4 stats you must keep: life, energy, control and reach, with the latter two only meaningful in the exploration phase. And if you want to gain points in any of these, you must make longer and harder words, a short 1-point-letters only word is basically useless. Decent word game, and to win you don’t just need to make tough words, you must also strategize about which letters you can afford to use before you bring too many attacking enemies to your base, when to spend energy to use out-of-reach letters, when to open treasure or destroy terrain vs attacking enemies, when to save valuable letters for better words, and so on.
  
• Jinchou (sliding, pathfinding, box pushing): Help a penguin reach the exit by sliding and bumping into walls and boxes. Boxes have momentum, so you can’t simply push a box while standing next to it, you have to run into it. The levels can get very challenging, especially since I keep forgetting about the no pushing rule. However, other than challenging levels, the game lacks polish: no undo, very simple graphics, no settings.
  
• Linesgo (pathfinding): Move blocks until you get one red, blue and yellow in a line. You only control the red “heads”, moving them like a snake leaving behind a trail of red cubes. The blue heads move the opposite way. The yellow ones just stay in place. It starts simple, but emergent mechanics make this really unintuitive. You must learn to use walls, block pushing and block breaking, the looping grid, all to win a level before running out of moves. But then there's a meta-goal: how many “unintended” cheeses can you find? Each time you have leftover moves, you collect them, and there's a leaderboard for collecting the most. Once you learn the more advanced mechanics, you find new ways to solve the earlier levels, so it’s not just finding one solution to each level, but playing them over and over looking for better ones. Good game!
  
• Snow Cone (sokoban): Prepare the perfect snow cone by rolling snowballs and scooping them up. This feels a lot like A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build, 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 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, sinking water. Too many explanations at the start for my taste, but that’s perfect for puzzle novices. And by the end of the demo it had me stumped a few times.
  
• Snowmelt Manor (open world, box pushing): This also feels a lot like A Good Snowman. There are patches of snow on the ground, and by pushing them you can form boxes of compact snow. You must then push these boxes on buttons that unlock both the gates to exit the room, and a display case in which you must put collectibles. There are more mechanics to discover, with snowmowers, wooden crates, water and others, all used in clever puzzles. And while at first each level is standalone, the open world structure does lead eventually to across-world secrets. An excellent game, give it a try!
  
• Sokobos 2 (sokoban): A sequel that is more focused: push vases into your big crate. There are rivers, and rocks, and you can push everything including the crate. Clever puzzles showcasing the interesting mechanics, but the demo is very short. Still, looking forward to the full game.
  
• Synthetic Hopes (stealth, puzzle platformer): In a future world in which androids aren't very welcome, play as an android escaping from a factory and trying to evade capture. There are cameras everywhere that can instantly detect androids, so you must find ways to hide from them. Lucky for you, you’re equipped with two state of the art robot arms that can project clouds and floating platforms, but they each have room for one shot. You must gather colors from the environment, release clouds matching each camera sensor, and make your way out of the factory. Decent puzzles, but not too difficult, not very demanding platforming, a well designed world full of lore and characters.
  
• Theta and Paralldoxs on Worldlines (quantum pathfinding sokoban): Help Theta find her way to the exit. But she has quantum powers! What does that mean? She can split in two, with both instances moving in sync (when possible). So in essence, it’s a game of guiding two avatars to the exit at the same time, but the game does fantastic things with the quantum superposition premise. What happens when one instance cannot move in the intended direction? What happens when there’s not enough room to split? What happens when you push a box in two different directions? The levels are really clever, but then the game pulls a Paquerette and reveals a fantastic new layer that I’m not going to spoil.
  
• Twist of Light (box pushing with gravity): This is great, it takes the “turn the world” puzzle game to new heights by adding crystals that behave differently under gravity: green falls and may crush you, blue stays in place, red stays in place but is magnetic and keeps you and other crystals in place. You can only move left or right and turn the world, no jumping, no climbing. Good puzzles, definitely something to try out and wishlist.

Amerzone is a remake of a good old adventure game. Eggpan is a pathfinding game in which you must walk the pan to the fire. It takes a lot of inspiration from A Monster’s Expedition, with humorous quotes, very gentle difficulty ramp-up, and only a handful of mechanics. Golden Arrow is a sokoban with multiple gravity directions, each box falls its own way, with very few mechanics put to good use in excellent puzzles. Heave Away Haul Away is an excellent Pixelus variant, you must throw and regrab boxes to make a target pixel image, with more interesting mechanics mixed in. Good levels, and a good ramp up in difficulty. I haven’t tried Old Skies, but it looks like a good point&click adventure. Spacecaps is a Sokoban in space, with no gravity, so orienting yourself is a real challenge. Like all Artless games, it looks very barebones, but the levels are super challenging. World of Goo 2 is just coming to Steam after being released almost a year ago on other platforms. If you’re not familiar with the first game, it’s a physics-based puzzle game in which you must use goo to build stable-enough structures that reach high or far. Cursed Sword calls itself Sokoban, but I don’t think it deserves that label, it’s a sliding strategic pathfinding game. Once Upon A Puppet is a 3D adventure / puzzle platformer with great worldbuilding, a good theme, and good graphics. You control a puppet and the hand that pulls its strings. Roam around, jump, push and pull objects to make platforms, upgrade your strings to gain new powers, and stay away from the shadows. Ratico Puzzle Adventure is a pathfinding puzzle game, with multiple goals in each level, but at least back when I first played the demo it put too much emphasis on time challenges. Replicube is pure Lua programming, write the shortest or fastest code to color a 2D/3D/4D cube of voxels to match the target image. Not quite a game as it is a pure code optimization challenge. SokobotS is a multiagent puzzle game that calls itself Sokoban, but the non-grid 3D environment and precision movement makes it more frustrating than thinky. SokoFarm looks like a vanilla Sokoban with a cute theme, seems rather easy, targeting more casual players, though I haven’t played it so don’t just take my word on that. Switch Box feels more like a maze with many interconnected screens, you keep going out one way and in another one, pushing buttons, gathering gems, collecting powers, going back again to reach that high ledge you couldn’t reach before. Interesting puzzles, but there's too much precision involved, with running jumps landing on a pixel, miss it and you land on spikes. Toco is a short game in which you must solve a grid of symbols so that combining all the cells in each column and row results in the desired pattern. A decent logic game, but with a minimal implementation.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2429190/Amerzone__The_Explorers_Legacy/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3570020/Eggpan_A_Sokoban_Adventure/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3633540/Golden_Arrow/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2641990/Heave_Away_Haul_Away/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1346360/Old_Skies/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3288510/Spacecaps/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3385670/World_of_Goo_2/

And the rest:

• Cube Lab (puzzle platformer)
  
• CursedSword (sliding, strategic pathfinding)
  
• Detective Dotson (detective, adventure)
  
• Gaslamp Cases 4: The Arcane Village (match3)
  
• Hegzis (hexagonal tetris)
  
• Once Upon A Puppet (3D puzzle platformer)
  
• Ratico Puzzle Adventure (pathfinding)
  
• Replicube (programming, zach-like)
  
• SokobotS (non-grid sokoban, pathfinding, precision)
  
• SokoFarm (sokoban)
  
• Switch Box (metroidvania, puzzle platformer)
  
• Toco (logic)

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

I just love this game, with its simple mechanics that manage to make very challenging levels, the beautiful open world, the wandering map, the secrets and meta-puzzles.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2338020/Mistified/

Highlighting a short and free puzzle game every week!

In Mole Mole you need to find your way home by carefully digging tunnels. Dig through soft soil, use bombs to destroy harder rocks, but make sure you don’t get drowned by the rushing water. Plenty of red herrings in the levels, so don’t just do the obvious, think outside the box! Works in a browser, even on a phone.

Highlighting another free puzzle game every week!

A short metroidbrania game, you are given a random power on the day of your graduation. Will it be the power to control animals? The power to control fire? Or super speed? Fate had other plans for you, since you get the lamest of powers, the ability to jump in a L pattern. Still, in the end it turns out that yours is the best power of all, since you discover interesting ways to use and solve puzzles where the others have failed. Nice mechanics that you must discover, good world design, funny story. Works in a browser, even on a phone.

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

A “meditative” game from Lucas Le Slo in which you must play with the Yin inside the Yang and the Yang inside the Yin. You must guide two balls, one white and one black, to their target spots, with the restriction that white can only exist inside black spots, and black only inside white spots. Push bubbles to make your own paths, discover many surprising mechanics, think your way to enlightenment in this very challenging take on Sokoban.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1115870/Inner_Tao/

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!

A “wordless game about language” from Lucas Le Slo, in which you must discover the surprising behavior of the Aleph letter and its many accents. The story is about an Elephant (or is that an Alephant?) who wants to communicate with other animals, but they don’t seem to understand each other, so you must show your mastery over the Aleph letter to successfully communicate. Each chapter introduces a new mechanic, with harder and harder levels, culminating in a “boss” level that really tests your understanding of the rules. And many times I thought I knew how something works only to be proven wrong. The puzzles are excellent, carefully guiding the rule discovery process, always staying one step ahead of what I think I know.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1823730/Alephant/

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.

Lord Victor’s video guide for So Fart Away.

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.
  
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