Brainrack, Issue #351 (January 30, 2026)

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 Steam event of the week is the Board Games Fest.

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:

• Alien Cartographer (logic, spatial deduction)
  
• Brain School (deduction, logic)
  
• Cheeseland Mistery (casual, strategy)
  
• Enchanted Stories: PAWisoned Kingdom CE (point&click, hidden object)
  
• Mars First Logistics (sandbox, building)

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 account is needed ; just visit the site and log in through Steam. Good luck!

Both BroomSweeper[www.steamgifts.com] and Links[www.steamgifts.com] are available only for our group members, courtesy of the developers.

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:

• A Game About Boxes (indie, platformer)
  
• Escape Games World vs Escapers (escape room, exploration)
  
• Geobeast (casual, trivia)
  
• How Smart Are You? IQ Test (trivia, word game)
  
• Melon Man (precision platformer)
  
• Memoria (casual, board game)
  
• Pocket Lint zero (point&click, board game)
  
• SantaCorps: Snow Patrol (sokoban, arcade)
  
• Uninvited: Security Service (stealth, exploration)
  
• Where We Went (adventure, mystery)

Paid Games - Now Free:

• Crudelis (adventure, RPGMaker)
  
• Dino Age: Dinosaur Survival Game (adventure, exploration)
  
• Jump Slash (platformer, action)
  
• Monster Factory (casual, exploration)
  
• Red Nose Guy Suika (casual, arcade)
  
• Space Chess (strategy, board game)

New Content:

• BroomSweeper has an update to toggle off any of the eight Hazmats in the settings.
  
• CorgiSpace added 3 new games.
  
• Musical Maze is out of early access.
  
• Paquerette Down the Bunburrows had a major update with lots of new stuff.
  
• Shuffled Sky added a new cave biome.

New Demos:

The Demo of the Week is CHASM SHIFT.

• 🎉 CHASM SHIFT (metroidvania, platformer): A very well done metroidvania, a platformer in which you gain new powers that let you explore more of the world. It has a very unique look, mostly grayscale with a few color accents. It’s got the smooth feel of a good platformer. The world layout is nicely designed, with the same rooms traversed again and again in different directions with different abilities. It’s also smart, focused (mostly) not on long, demanding runs, but on brief challenges that also exercise your brain, not just your fingers. Unfortunately, I’m not too good at platformers, but I still enjoyed what I played. My main complaint is that, while there are frequent save points at first, I eventually stumbled into a long, arduous area with no save point in the middle. (my playthrough)
  
• 😐 Come Again, Chachii? (word game, visual riddles): A word game in which you must find the secret word or phrase. Each level has an obscure clue, a word template you must fill in, and a bunch of letters. Sometimes you have exactly as many letters as the target word needs, so it’s an anagram. Sometimes you’re given extra letters, which makes it more difficult to figure out what the target word should be. And often you don’t have enough letters, and must find one hiding somewhere. It gets quite challenging, perhaps too challenging; I often had no idea what I was supposed to do in a level for a few minutes. That’s not necessarily bad—I welcome a tough challenge. But the pixel graphics are not easy to comprehend, and worse, the text is sometimes unreadable, with dark grid lines caused by fractional scaling. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Enough (sokoban, story rich): You play as a little demon who’s tired of the same old boring life in hell and is trying to get back into heaven for a change. You’ll solve small Sokoban-style puzzles filled not only with pushable boxes, but also with characters you can talk to. While the puzzles are fairly easy, the dialogue is very detailed, with dozens of lines for each character, and there’s often more than one character in each room. Fortunately, all the dialogue is optional: you can ignore everyone and breeze through the puzzles if you want. It’s fun and relaxing, with plenty of quirky characters to chat with, and at least in the demo, the puzzles are rarely challenging.
  (my playthrough)
  
• 😐 Heretic Red (detective, story-rich, RPG): A detective game with a lot of talking. It feels like an RPGMaker game, with a lot of walking about and lots of characters to talk to. The story in the demo is that during a severe winter storm, 12 people gather for shelter and decide to have a tea ceremony. When one of the characters gets poisoned, it’s up to you to figure out how, why, and by whom. As you talk with everyone, you gather clue cards, which you must then use to answer questions like “when was the tea poisoned?” It’s quite verbose and rather obvious, but worth checking out. (my playthrough)
  
• 😐 Linework (detective, papers-please-like): A mix between Papers Please and a detective game. You are a detective interrogating witnesses and suspects, gathering evidence, spotting discrepancies between the documents and testimonies you have and what the current interviewee says. It’s interesting, I liked the idea, but on a small screen, the game is broken, things don’t fit properly, and at some point, an important document is stuck under the UI with no way to drag it out and present it to the suspect. I also found the tutorialization too “helpful”, always telling me what I need to do at every step. Perhaps this is just plaguing the early stages of the demo, I’d like to give it a try on my big desktop. (my partial playthrough)
  
• 👍 Little Woody (point&click, escape room): An escape room style game in which you play as a little sentient piece of wood. It’s good-looking, the puzzles are OK, the controls are simple; my main complaint is that it needs to be optimized; it made my Deck huff and puff too much. (my playthrough)
  
• 😐 Liv (visual novel, mystery): A FMV detective and escape room game. Your ex-girlfriend disappeared, and you are the prime suspect. Escape from the police interrogation, hack into their computers to look for clues, solve riddles to unlock new videos, all as a first-person movie. It’s interesting, but at the moment, the voice acting is only in Italian, with English subtitles. (my playthrough)
  
• 😐 MetalMuters (logic-strategy, factory builder, roguelike): A logical strategy game where you transmute elements using cards. It’s a roguelike: you get different random goals to accomplish with only a few attempts to complete them. You have various action cards that you must place on a small grid, then activate for a turn, then rearrange and activate again and again until you either achieve the goal, run out of activations, or end up without enough resources to do anything. I like the idea. It feels like a mix of a mini factory builder, alchemy, strategy, and logic. However, even though it has a fairly verbose tutorial, I still found it confusing. It needs a clearer tutorial and more overall polish, but it’s promising. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Micromega (physics, platformer, hidden object): Physics gravity game in which you must guide an upwards falling ball through a maze-like contraption. What stands out the most in this game is the graphics. It’s all hand-drawn, mechanical but organic, creepy, full of details and flourishes. Each level consists of fixed parts and movable parts. The movable parts are handled by “creatures” you can control, which can push buttons, pull ropes, walk, and perform other actions. Some of the creatures don’t affect the level at all, but you still need to find and click them as hidden collectibles in each stage. Beyond simply guiding the ball to the exit, you also need to do it safely by avoiding deadly spikes and not sending it down the wrong path. It’s challenging, but also helpful, since you have safe checkpoints in longer levels, unlimited rewind, and the ability to zoom and pan the entire level to prepare the path ahead of time. Good features! This reminds me a lot of OVIVO. I liked it. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Puzzletrunk (puzzle of the month club): Each month, there’s one big puzzle to solve—not big in size, but in complexity: a hard-to-decipher riddle with multiple steps. And each month seems to be wildly different from the rest, with games as diverse as a shooter that’s not really a shooter, an old-style text-based adventure, a “simple” scene with 5 bird cages to unlock, 21 word riddles… While I made some progress in the little time I spent on each puzzle, they seem very hard, and the developers encourage group solving and/or asking for hints in their Discord chats. (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 RE-TAPED (puzzle platformer): A puzzle platformer in which you can record your actions and replay them with a clone. This feels better than the usual “me and my past clones” games, since you don’t have to replay the entire level repeatedly—just a small segment at a time. There is also a hidden collectible in each level, for an extra challenge. The puzzles are good, and it mostly feels smooth, but it took me a while to get used to the controls. my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Rollo Pollo (path programming): Help! Evil robots are threatening the baby chicks! Can you help the silly roosters and hens take them all to safety? It’s a path-programming game: the chickens move automatically, and you have to place arrows in their path to redirect them. I liked it, and there are supposed to be hidden collectibles, but I didn’t manage to find any. It’s a bit awkward to control, and a bit buggy, but good otherwise. (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 SokoGhost: Unfinished Business (sokoban): A sokoban-style puzzler in which you play as a ghost. As ghosts usually do, you can phase through walls and boxes when needed. Even better, if you enter a box, the box also gains ghostly powers and can be pushed through walls or other boxes. This means that moving a box next to a wall isn’t a dead end anymore—nice! However, you can only do this a limited number of times, so you have to be careful about which boxes you make ghostly and when you choose to phase through walls. It was top-notch; I really liked the demo. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Topobeam (sokoban, lasers): A light redirecting puzzle in a toroidal world. The edges of the level aren’t walls; they instead wrap back to the other side, sometimes facing the same way, sometimes twisted so that left becomes right or up becomes down. You can move mirrors, boxes, and laser sources around until all the targets are hit, but be careful not to step into the light beam. Good puzzles, though the presentation could use some major improvements. (my playthrough)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3134580/Alien_Cartographer/

A logic game in which you must deduce the right type of buildings on a grid. Feels like a more complicated Minesweeper. There are different colors and building types, and each correctly identified building tells you something about its neighbors. The rules aren't few, but not too many either, and it takes several levels until you finally understand all of them and their implications. But the game is excellent if you're a fan of logical deduction games. Highly recommended.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3503880/Astronook/

A cozy astronomy-inspired game. Explore space from your bedroom, connect the dots to draw constellations, tune your telescope to take perfect photos, read snippets of information, and do other little activities.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3473250/BroomSweeper/

Minesweeper roguelike 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's 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.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4072070/Cubuleto/

Find your way through puzzling worlds made out of cubes. Classic pathfinding/stepping game, with buttons, portals, and fragile floors, but also enemies that like to charge towards you when they spot you. Getting enemies to the right place is the goal of most levels.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2720730/Our_Journey_The_Silent_Voice/

In an asymmetrical co-op puzzle game, two players play as a doer and a knower. The “ghost” knows what’s needed to solve the puzzles, but the “body” is the one who can interact with the puzzle elements. The trick? The ghost can’t just tell what needs to be done; it can only use simple symbols to try to convey the information. Of course, the two players could just chat outside the game, but that would ruin all the fun. It’s good, take a look if you have a friend to play with.

store.steampowered.com/app/3514940/Social_Caterpillar/

A puzzle game about learning social interactions through abstract puzzles: You play as an introvert with no social skills and social energy. The “main path” of the game is about learning how to interact with people. As you explore more of the world, you encounter situations that you must learn to deal with. These are logic puzzles, “which of these 3 images fits in with the sequence above” type puzzles. But each interaction has different rules, which you have to figure out. Besides the main and obvious path, the game is like 80% secrets, puzzles that are either hidden or hidden in plain sight. Even at the start of the game, you cannot do anything at all until you find the first secret. There are secret rooms to find, caterpillars to collect, arcade games to track down and master, and, hardest of all, secret animals to discover. Everything could be a clue, but nothing ever clearly says what it means or where it applies.
A lot of stuff to do in this game, all with non-obvious solutions. It’s looking like one of my favorite games of this year, highly recommended.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3838370/TR49/
A database search/deduction/narrative game, like Type Help, where you have to deduce 4-character codes. You’re dropped in front of a strange, computer‑like device with no guidance except for a single input field for a code. What are the codes? What do they mean? What is the computer for? If you pay close attention, you’ll gradually deduce how the codes relate to the text on the screen, and then you’ll be able to figure out which ones you need to enter. Each code leads to a piece of text, which you must read, understand, and cross-reference with all the other knowledge you have. While the game has an index of codes you’ve already discovered, this isn’t enough: you’ll want to keep your own notes, building an encyclopedia of knowledge mirroring the computer, mapping dates, names, and the relationships between people. I won’t say any more, since discovering the rules and story of the game is the goal. Highly recommended.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1287170/Thiefs_Roulette/

An escape-room-style game—or rather, an escape building. Three teams compete in a race to unlock rooms as quickly as possible. You’re on one of the teams, along with several friends. Except it’s effectively a single-player game: you’re the only one doing anything, while everyone else just stands around waiting for you to talk to them. They might offer the occasional hint, but that’s about it. So in practice, it’s really a single‑player escape room. (my playthrough of the first level in the demo)

And the Rest:

• Detective Bass in Fish out of Water (detective, interactive fiction): A short and easy detective story, very punny, but the game almost plays itself.
  
• Attrax (test chambers): A 3D puzzle game in which you have to guide projectiles to targets by turning magnetic fields on/off, red/blue. I only played a bit of the demo; it had too many trivial levels explaining the basics, too much walking around the room to move from button to button, and even quick running to time the push of a button while the projectile was moving.
  
• Chess Quest: A Cozy Puzzle (chess-like): A knight's tour chess-like puzzle: move a knight across levels, avoiding capture, collecting tokens, capturing the king when he’s present on the board, and then reaching the flag. There are only a few puzzles, but they are randomly repeated to make an infinite game that you never actually end. Sometimes you get the same puzzle two times in a row, and you often get the first, trivial puzzle again and again. There’s no undo, no level selection, and almost no settings. True to its name, it’s a “cozy” game you can mindlessly play on repeat.

Highlighting a short and free puzzle game every week!

For the past two months, thousands of players have enjoyed the daily puzzles from the community behind the Thinky Games website. Unlike many other daily puzzle sites, which always feature the same type of challenge, Thinky Dailies presents you with something new each day—from popular classics like Nonograms to lesser‑known formats like Windows, sometimes with unique twists, such as an irregular sudoku that uses letters instead of numbers to form a word like FRIEND. Beyond grid-based puzzles, there are occasional visual riddles: images you must analyze and interpret to extract a word or a number. Each puzzle is framed within an overarching story following the adventures of the Thinky Games mascot monster. Accordingly, every puzzle comes with a short intro, a cute drawing, and a brief ending text. You also get clear rules for each game and gradual hints that gently guide you through every puzzle. The first season has just ended, so you can now play all 61+1 puzzles while you wait for season two to start. Since this was a semi‑closed beta aimed at ironing out bugs and gauging perceived difficulty, access is gated by an introductory riddle that you must solve to prove you’re worthy of entering the game.

It’s really well done—I hope you give it a try! It works in a browser, even on a phone.

Highlighting another free puzzle game every week!

A puzzle game about two dogs braving a frigid landscape: One is small and can’t move through snow or water, but can press buttons, while the other is big and can dig through snow and wade in water, but can’t press buttons. They need to work together to reach their bed in 30 levels. It’s a lovely game, not too challenging, perfect for solving in a warm, cozy blanket. Give it a try, and if you want more corgi puzzles, check out CorgiSpace. Works in a browser, even on a phone.

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.

Nana’s guide for Where's my egg?.

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.