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17 reviews · 7 essays
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Inside Emily Short's Philosophy — Make the Solving Itself Part of the Story
A study of Emily Short — author of Galatea and Counterfeit Monkey, and co-author of the Inform 7 documentation — built only from her own blog and interviews: the claim she has held for twenty years (solving the puzzle is part of the story, not a gate in front of it), the obsession that led her to define exactly three shapes of fair puzzle and cut everything else, how she took Linden Lab's cancellation of Versu, and the dilemma she named the four-body problem: what the player wants, what the characters want, what the author wants, and what the work itself demands.
Chen: Reconstruct the Persistent World First, Then Build Something Playable — Fukai Reads
A narrative-to-game paper by Yi-Chun Chen. Before generating scenes or gameplay individually, it makes explicit reconstruction of a persistent world — entities, locations, relationships, evolving state — the central objective, maintained as one computational object shared across the pipeline. The prototype builds the world with GPT-5-mini plus constrained world completion and realises it as playable tile-based PyGame environments. An arXiv preprint offering qualitative feasibility across three cases, with no quantitative evaluation.
Counterpoint on Gone Home — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi gave Gone Home 8/10. I went through Steam's 4,198 negative reviews instead — "barely even a game," "two hours for twenty dollars," "an overhyped soap opera" — and tested five recurring claims against the game's design.
Munk et al.: Generating Dynamic Game Text with Small Language Models — Fukai Reads
A paper by Munk et al. (IT University of Copenhagen) on generating in-game text dynamically with small language models (SLMs). It tackles the offline, cost and consistency walls of cloud LLMs using small models aggressively fine-tuned for narrow jobs. Their proof of concept, DefameLM, runs a medieval-RPG smear-poster loop, showing a one-billion-parameter-class model reaches high quality in a few seconds on a consumer PC.
Counterpoint on Storyteller — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Storyteller 7.5/10. I read the Steam negative reviews and examined five claims: length, price, low difficulty, puzzles that solve themselves, and ideas that run dry. Where I agree, where I push back.
Narrative Puzzles and Storyless Puzzles — Lorelei vs Stephen's Sausage Roll
The pure maneuvers of Stephen's Sausage Roll versus Lorelei and the Laser Eyes' solutions fused with story. What narrative and storyless puzzles each sell, contrasted from a designer's view across Obra Dinn, Golden Idol, COCOON, and Machinarium.
Carving the Learning Curve — Baba's Vertical Wall and How It Was Built
When and how should a puzzle game stop the player? A comparison of Baba Is You's notorious vertical wall, Cocoon's unbroken flow, and the design philosophy that lives between them.
Related reviews
Thomas Was Alone
A 2D puzzle-platformer in which you switch between coloured rectangles, each given exactly one ability, and combine them into stepping stones across 120 levels. A narrator reads out what the shapes are thinking as you go. Released in 2012 by Mike Bithell's Bithell Games.
puzzlepuzzle-platformernarrativeEliza
A visual novel about a woman who returns to work as the human voice of an AI counseling app, reading its scripted lines aloud to clients. Written by Matthew Seiji Burns and made by Zachtronics, the studio behind Opus Magnum, it ships with a kabufuda solitaire game on the side.
visual-novelnarrativeadventureRöki
A point-and-click adventure through a snowbound forest drawn from Nordic folklore, following Tove as she gathers and combines objects to search for her sister. Polygon Treehouse's game has no combat and no fail state, carried instead by hand-drawn landscapes and a story about loss.
adventurepoint-and-clicknarrativeBrothers - A Tale of Two Sons
Two brothers set out to find the Water of Life for their dying father. The left stick moves the older brother and the right the younger, both at once, and you cross ravines, waterways and the bones of giants by pairing what each of them can do. Every line is spoken in an invented language. Directed by Josef Fares at Starbreeze Studios, released in 2013.
puzzleadventurepuzzle-platformerTHE LONGING
A hand-drawn adventure about waiting. You play a small Shade, alone deep underground, whose one task is to wait 400 days for a sleeping king to wake. Everything moves slowly, from the walking to the doors, and the timer keeps running while the game is closed. You can explore the caves, furnish a room, and read real classic novels to make the time pass faster. Made by Studio Seufz.
adventureidlepoint-and-clickUnheard - Voices of Crime
A deduction adventure played over a top-down floor plan: you move between rooms and scrub a recording of the day back and forth, listening. There are no subtitles — you name the figures and answer the case questions using only what you heard. From NExT Studios.
mysteryobservationpuzzleTacoma
A first-person exploration adventure set aboard an emptied space station in 2088, where you replay, rewind and walk around volumetric recordings of its six-person crew to reconstruct the days before they left. From Fullbright, the studio behind Gone Home.
observationnarrativeadventureGrim Fandango Remastered
A 3D point-and-click adventure in which you play Manny Calavera, a skeletal travel agent in the Land of the Dead, following a journey and a conspiracy told across four years. Double Fine's rebuild of a film-noir-meets-Day-of-the-Dead world, with repainted textures, dynamic lighting and a re-recorded live score.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickIs This Seat Taken?
A 2D logic puzzle in which you seat a cast of little shapes — in a cinema, a bus, a taxi, a wedding reception, a diner — pulling them one at a time out of the queue and settling them where they want to be. Someone refuses to sit behind a big hat, a child wants to stay next to their parent, a nose objects to the coffee two seats over; you look for the one arrangement nobody complains about. Poti Poti Studio, published by Wholesome Games Presents in 2025.
puzzlelogicnarrativeMoncage
A wordless optical-illusion puzzle adventure. Each face of a glass cube holds a different world, and rotating your view until two silhouettes line up locks them into a single mechanism. You move between a factory, a lighthouse, an amusement park and a church, picking up scattered photographs that assemble the story of a father and a son. From Optillusion.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickGenesis Noir
A hand-drawn black-and-white point-and-click adventure in which you play No Man, a watch peddler diving through the history of the universe to save his love from the Big Bang — a gunshot fired by a jealous god. Feral Cat Den built it out of tactile puzzles: turn a dial, touch a thing, see what happens.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickTin Hearts
A Lemmings-style 3D puzzler seen from above: place contraptions on a diorama to steer a troop of tin soldiers who never stop marching. Set in a Victorian inventor's house and solved with time-rewind and a handful of tools, from Rogue Sun, made by former Fable developers.
puzzlelemmings-likenarrativeObservation
You are S.A.M., the AI of a damaged space station: switch between cameras, drift through the corridors as a spherical drone, and piece together what happened to the vanished crew — and to yourself. You aren't on the station; you are the station. From No Code, makers of Stories Untold.
puzzlenarrativefirst-personThe Operator
A first-person investigation adventure worked entirely from one FDI computer console — video analyzer, databases, ChemScan, terminal — connecting evidence as the 'man in the chair' to unravel a conspiracy. Bureau 81's 2024 desktop thriller.
mysteryinvestigationnarrativeTwelve Minutes
A real-time, top-down thriller in a single apartment: you are killed, snap back to the moment you opened the door, and loop the same twelve minutes, using only what you have learned to break the cycle. Luis Antonio builds dread from few verbs and one room.
mysterynarrativetime-loopHeaven's Vault
An archaeology adventure where you sail rivers of space, recover artefacts from forgotten ruins, and decipher an invented hieroglyphic script one word at a time from context. Built on a branching story that remembers your choices and a language you piece together yourself. From inkle, makers of 80 Days.
puzzlenarrativemysteryStoryteller
A puzzle about arranging characters and scenes across comic panels to satisfy a given story title — love, revenge, jealousy — making each prompt come true as a few-panel tale. A compact narrative puzzle by Daniel Benmergui.
puzzlenarrative
