10 games to tease your brain

TheCerebral Puzzle Showcaseis underway on Steam, offering demos and discounts onpuzzle gamesuntil Monday. It is quite a lot of puzzle games. If your head feels itchy and your brain distinctly unteased, here, I have a few recommendations to get you started.

AsI’ve written before, it takes tile-flipping ideas of match-3 games but has you finding the correct order to make matches and carefully remove every tile until nothing remains. I dig it!

This murder mystery aboard a cursed ship has been cheaper in sales before, but it’s still one of the very best puzzle games and worth it. The Obra Dinn has been found adrift, her entire crew dead or missing, and it’s up to you to figure out what happened with the help of a magic pocketwatch which lets you revisit the frozen moment of someone’s death. So to fill out our ledger, we must identify bones and uncover what caused them to become bones, by listening to moments of drama, cross-referencing with illustrations, scruntising socks of sleeping sailors, tracking relationships, and so many more techniques to solve the serial catastrophes. A deductive delight. I adore the clanging bells on the soundtrack, too.

That’s a hell of a lot ofMinesweeper-ish logic puzzling for two quid. John Walker was a huge fan of the series, reviewing all three games in this bundle across the years:Hexcells,Hexcells Plus, andHexcells Infinite. In the last of those three reviews, he said the series “offers that ideal position of apparent simplicity, but a depth of complexity.” I have to mention these games, or he’d get me.

“It’s Groundhog Day in an astronaut’s suit,” Brendy said in ourOuter Wilds review. “But it is also a learning game, generous of spirit, playful and encouraging. It taps into all those Carl Saganisms that make us look at the night sky and nod enthusiastically at the Big Dipper. Overflowing with a toyish love of astronomy and physics, it jettisons stuffy formulae for adventures on dangerous planets full of sand, and one-way trips to icy comets hurtling around the sun.”

It is currentlyin Epic’s sale, where it does qualify for a bonus 25% discount coupon. But I’m including it here for serious Steamers.

Like Obra Dinn, this has been cheaper before, but like Obra Dinn, this is one of the very best puzzle games. Or best strategy games. Or both. Human civilisation is ravaged by rampaging giant monsters, so we control squads of time-travelling mecha jumping between timelines to stop the end of the world. It’s a roguelikelike turn-based strategy game, each campaign a new challenge, but battles feel strongly puzzle-y. Each turn, you know exactly what your enemies will do and what your attacks will do, letting you plot complex chains of attacks, shoves, and blocks. So plan carefully, scratch your head hard, and you can pull of wonderfully complex cascades to save the day while squishing bugs. A joy.

“There are those games whose technology or setpieces or storytelling I thrill to,” Alec Meer said in ourInto The Breach review. “Then there are the games where I marvel, most of all, at the elegance of the design, the remarkable precision at which so many interlocking gears are arranged, particularly in something as breezily-executed as Into The Breach. The Spelunkies, the Slay The Spires and, of course, the FTLs. Into The Breach effortlessly joins those ranks, instantly feeling ageless and ingenious, a collecting of long-known designs honed to a glorious sheen.”

It is cheaperin Epic’s current sale(and has been free there before too) but I know some folks prefer Steam.

John’s glowingGorogoa reviewsaid the picture panel puzzler is “a beautiful story in which you solve puzzles more by instinct than deduction, and their solutions feel as magical as the process.”

A real-time stealth-action-puzzle game which includes one of the most joyous puzzling tools in puzzling history: shoving men out windows. It’s a few years old now but Johnrevisited itnot so long ago and would still push you to have a go. Push, eh?

A fiendishly clever and careful Sokoban-y game about cooking sausages to perfection.

“Weirdly for a game about sausages the size of hay bales, I’d say this is all meat and no fat or filler,” Pip said in ourStephen’s Sausage Roll review. “It’s a blessing for people like me who will tussle with it over a series of lovely evenings or keep it running in the background to fiddle with throughout the day. For others it will be a royal pain in the arse, an utterly inaccessible gem taunting them with its low poly style and seemingly-simple gameplay.”

I am fascinated and distressed by the infinite repeating void architecture of this 3D first-person puzzler, and I’m not the only one.

“I cannot help but imagine myself, trapped in an endless kaleidoscope. Running through corridor after identical corridor. Walking out of a room and finding myself on a pyramid of steps without end. Just running around the same strange building, and only seeing more of that building. Forever. I cannot imagine a worse horror. Argh,” Alice Bee said in ourManifold Garden review. “Good puzzles, though.”

Oh, this isin Epic’s current saletoo. It’s not expensive enough to qualify for a coupon by itself, but if you’re buying a few things?

John’sBaba Is You reviewdeclared “this is wonderful. Completely wonderful. Original, inspired, challenging, and most importantly of all, that constant sense of ‘Oh no, how will I ever do this one!’ so quickly followed by, ‘I AM A GENIUS!’ It’s a very, very smart game, that has the humility to let you, the player, feel like the clever one.

Which other chinscratchers and brainteasers would you recommend, reader dear?

Disclosure:Gunpointdev Tom Francishas written for RPS.