WEEKLY-RELEASES · 2026-08-10
Last Week's Releases — 2026-08-03
Five picks from Steam (3 puzzle, 2 adjacent). House House's Big Walk headlined the week
This week
Last week (Aug 3-9) had an obvious headliner: Big Walk, the online co-op exploration puzzler from Untitled Goose Game studio House House, which piled up Very Positive reviews from day one.
In its shadow, though, a jigsaw-meets-cleanup sim quietly collected a 95% rating, and a This Bed We Made spin-off, redstone-circuit puzzler Pight, and grid puzzler Hopping Out rounded out a week of small but well-made releases.
Five picks this week: three puzzle, two adjacent. As always, for games I haven't played myself, I'm working from store reception, developer posts, and media coverage — the level of certainty is marked in each writeup.
Big Walk (from the official Steam screenshots)
This week's picks
Big Walk
The long-awaited follow-up from House House, the studio behind Untitled Goose Game. This time you're not the nuisance — you're the one walking and talking. It's online co-op only, built around proximity voice chat: the island's environmental and communication puzzles weave your voice range and gestures into the mechanics themselves, by all accounts. Roughly 7,500 reviews at 92% in launch week, plus a 92 on Metacritic — far and away the week's biggest opening. If you love "explaining things badly to friends" puzzlers like We Were Here, this is an easy call. One caveat: it's multiplayer-first, so solo players should pass.
Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery
An odd and charming hybrid of first-person cleanup sim and jigsaw puzzle. An earthquake has scattered 2,071 pieces across a gallery of 87 public-domain masterpieces — Monet, Van Gogh, Hokusai — and you put them all back. It reportedly plays both ways: classical music and art appreciation for the relaxed crowd, skill upgrades and time attack for min-maxers, plus custom image uploads to rebuild the gallery your way. 240 reviews at 95% within days makes it the week's quiet hit. Note: the developer discloses AI tools were used for code (all art is scans of historical paintings). For anyone who loved the tidy-up satisfaction of A Little to the Left.
Lost & Found: A This Bed We Made Story
A short standalone spin-off of the 1950s Montreal hotel mystery This Bed We Made (2023) — playable without the base game, per the developer, at a stated 1-2 hours. As the title suggests, lost items are the thread: like the original, you read people's circumstances from the traces they leave on objects. 191 reviews at 93% within days is a strong start for a spin-off. A perfect weekend-sized piece for fans of observation-driven deduction like The Painscreek Killings, and a cheap entry point if you never played the original.
Pight
Minecraft's redstone circuitry and pistons, distilled into a pure puzzle game. Route signals, push blocks with pistons, and complete each level's circuit. There are no tutorials: 90 levels across 8 mechanics teach entirely through level design, reportedly. A level editor is included, and it's also on itch.io. Only 13 reviews so far, but 100% positive, and at $3.99 it's an easy experiment. If current-and-contraption logic is your thing — if ElecHead or Turing Complete clicked for you — take a look at this one first.
Hopping Out
The reputation here is still forming — only a few Steam reviews so far — but this grid puzzler has already made it into the Thinky Games database, and it looks promising. Hop over tiles, stop when you bump into walls, ride butterflies, cross lily pads, and eat every fly on each level. It layers ride-style gimmicks onto movement constraints, and at 200 levels across 7 worlds from a solo developer, there's real volume. If you like Snakebird-style grid movement puzzles, the demo is the natural place to start.
My pick of the week
If you have people to play with, Big Walk is the obvious call. But if you're opening something alone with a cup of coffee, my pick is Pight — teaching circuit grammar through level design alone, with zero tutorials, is a luxury at $3.99.
On my radar
Today (Aug 10) brings Backpack Boy, a light-through-obstacles puzzler that Thinky Games has flagged. Servant of the Lake, in which you serve a suspicious household, follows on Aug 13, and nonogram-meets-sokoban Sokogram lands Aug 25. All candidates for future editions of this column.
Closing
A blockbuster launch week where an odd little jigsaw game quietly gathers 240 reviews — those are the weeks I like best. If something here caught your eye, put it on your weekend calendar. I'll be copying next week's release list into my notebook, thinking about Pight's later levels.
Sources
Store pages and media referenced in this article:
・Steam: Cleaning Up The Puzzle Gallery
・Steam: Lost & Found: A This Bed We Made Story
・Thinky Games database (new & upcoming releases)
・GameGrin: Top 25 New Steam Games This Week (3rd-9th August 2026)
Reactions (no login)
Anonymous • one of each per visitor per day
