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77 reviews · 12 essays
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Counterpoint on Papers, Please — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Papers, Please 9/10. I read the Steam negative reviews (roughly 3% of the total) and examined five claims: repetition, pacing, a shallow political message, too few verbs, and replay value. Where I agree, where I push back.
Solving by Ear — Designing Puzzles Around Sound (from The Witness's Jungle to Unheard)
Puzzle clues lean overwhelmingly on sight. This essay traces the thin lineage of games that made sound primary information—the birdsong of The Witness's jungle, the echoes of Dark Echo, the eavesdropping of Unheard, the synthesizers of FRACT OSC—and asks why audio clues stay rare (unsearchable, unwritable, inaudible) and how design can overcome it.
In-Game Notebook Design — Where Should a Deduction Puzzle Keep Its Memory? (from Obra Dinn to Chants of Sennaar)
The difficulty of a deduction puzzle changes with where the player's memory lives. From La-Mulana and Her Story, which pushed notes onto real paper, to Obra Dinn's self-filling logbook and the hypothesis slots of Golden Idol and Chants of Sennaar, this essay rereads the in-game notebook as a design device.
Solving the Time Loop — Designing Games Where Knowledge Is the Only Save Data (from Majora's Mask to Outer Wilds)
A time loop is a machine for making knowledge the only save data. From Majora's Mask's three days to Outer Wilds' twenty-two minutes and The Sexy Brutale's twelve hours, a design reading of loop games as observation puzzles extended along the axis of time.
Counterpoint on Chants of Sennaar — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Chants of Sennaar 8.5/10. I read the negative Steam reviews and examined three families of complaints: genre detours, map-less traversal, and a rushed final act at a full price. Where I agree, and where I push back.
Counterpoint on Antichamber — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Antichamber 8.5/10. I read through the negative reviews and examined five claims: withheld information, trial and error, a reversed difficulty curve, a weaker back half, and the physical toll of all that white. Where I agree, where I push back.
Counterpoint on Return of the Obra Dinn — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Return of the Obra Dinn 9.5/10. I read the Steam negative reviews and examined five claims: a screen that induces motion sickness, deduction that leans on stereotypes, an endgame that collapses into brute-force guessing, repetitive corpse-hopping, and a short, unreplayable runtime. Where I agree, where I push back.
Counterpoint on Gorogoa — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi gave Gorogoa a 9.0/10. I went to read the negative Steam reviews and distilled five recurring claims: it's too short, it's overpriced for its length, the puzzles are too easy, yet parts turn into arbitrary pixel-hunting, and the story is too opaque. Where do I agree, and where do I push back?
Counterpoint on Lorelei and the Laser Eyes — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Lorelei and the Laser Eyes 9.0/10. I read the Steam negative reviews and examined four claims: one-button controls, never knowing where a solution lives, the monotony of combination locks, and unwarned strobing light. Where I agree, where I push back.
Counterpoint on Outer Wilds — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi rated Outer Wilds 9.5/10. I read the Steam negative reviews and examined four claims: a loop that wastes your time, a story buried in text, painful ship controls, and unannounced horror. Where I agree, where I push back.
Counterpoint on The Witness — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi gave The Witness a 9.0/10. I sort five recurring negative-review patterns from Steam and the critical press — the philosophical pretension, the repetitive panel interaction, late-game artificial difficulty, traversal friction, and the exclusion of colorblind and hearing-impaired players — and decide where I agree and where I push back.
Observation as Play — Common Grammar of Witness, Obra Dinn, and Lorelei
The Witness, Return of the Obra Dinn, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes all turn the act of looking into a verb. A look at the grammar these three share.
Related reviews
The 7th Guest: 25th Anniversary Edition
A first-person puzzle adventure set in an empty mansion, where six invited guests and twenty-one room-sized contraptions stand between you and the house's secret. This is MojoTouch's 2019 reissue of Trilobyte's 1993 landmark, the game that showed what a CD-ROM could hold.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickLa-Mulana 2
A 2D exploration-puzzle action game in which Lumisa Kosugi descends into the ancient ruins of Eg-Lana with a whip and a notebook. You copy down the inscriptions on the walls and match them to contraptions several rooms away. NIGORO's sequel to La-Mulana.
puzzleexplorationmetroidvaniaWilmot Works It Out
A puzzle-building game: open the weekly package, pull out square pieces, assemble the pictures, and hang the finished ones on your walls. Each package mixes pieces from several pictures, so sorting comes before building. The sequel to Wilmot’s Warehouse, from Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg.
puzzleobservationlogicIn Other Waters
A non-violent sci-fi adventure in which you play the AI aboard a stranded xenobiologist's diving suit, scanning an alien ocean from a panel of contour lines and cataloguing the life you find. From Jump Over The Age, built so the ocean is never rendered — only described.
narrative-puzzleobservationexplorationHypnospace Outlaw
An observation adventure set in 1999. You patrol Hypnospace — a virtual internet people browse in their sleep — as a volunteer Enforcer, wandering personal homepages and digging out rule violations and hidden pages with nothing but a weak search box and thin clues. Designed by Jay Tholen at Tendershoot.
observationnarrative-puzzlesimulationPlease, Don't Touch Anything
You are covering a colleague's bathroom break in front of an unmarked console with a single red button, and you have been told not to touch anything. A pixel-art point-and-click puzzle by Four Quarters about reading the clues hidden in the posters and the wiring to dig out its 25 endings.
puzzlepoint-and-clickobservationMachinika: Museum
A first-person puzzle box in which you scan alien devices of unknown origin delivered to a museum, peer inside them and reprint their missing parts until they run again. A short piece from Littlefield Studio that opens seven machines one at a time, with the touch of science-fiction archaeology.
puzzleescape-roomobservationPaquerette Down the Bunburrows
A 2D puzzle game about cornering rabbits down in a warren. The bunnies flee by fixed rules, so you close their escape routes in advance with traps, a pickaxe and carrots. Five themed depths, over a hundred bunnies and a stack of secrets underneath, made by Bunstack.
puzzlesokoban-likepathfindingOrwell: Keeping an Eye On You
An adventure in which you operate a state surveillance system, assembling citizen profiles from fragments lifted out of social posts, news articles, private messages and tapped calls, and deciding who gets flagged. Osmotic Studios' five-episode surveillance drama, where submitting or withholding a fragment is your only move.
observationnarrative-puzzlesimulationScene Investigators
A first-person deduction game: walk reconstructed crime scenes, work out what happened from the evidence alone, and type your answers into an exam terminal. No hints, no confirmation. From EQ Studios, makers of The Painscreek Killings, built on their stated 70/30 principle.
deductionobservationinvestigationUnheard - 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.
observationnarrativeadventureLa-Mulana
A 2D exploration-puzzle action game in which an archaeologist descends into the vast ruins of La-Mulana with a whip and a laptop, decoding tablet inscriptions while surviving traps and monsters. NIGORO's remake of their own MSX-inspired maze game, ported to PC.
puzzleexplorationmetroidvaniaTOEM
A hand-drawn monochrome observation-puzzle adventure in which a child leaves home with their grandmother's camera, photographs whatever the villagers and townspeople ask for, shows them the shot, and uses the stamps earned to move on to the next region — rotating the view to hunt for subjects, from Something We Made.
puzzleobservationadventureGrim 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-clickThe House of Da Vinci
A first-person escape puzzler set in Florence, 1506: in the workshop of a vanished Leonardo you use a lens that sees inside objects and a device that replays the past, opening one wood-and-brass contraption after another. Built around nesting — every solved mechanism opens into a further one — by Slovakia's Blue Brain Games, 2017.
escape-roompuzzleobservationGhost Trick: Phantom Detective
A puzzle adventure in which a newly dead protagonist possesses the objects around him, chains the single action each one owns, and rearranges the world in the four minutes before somebody dies. Directed by Shu Takumi of Ace Attorney for the Nintendo DS in 2010, brought to Steam by Capcom as an HD remaster.
puzzleadventuremysteryBroken Age
A village girl chosen as a sacrifice and a boy aboard a spaceship run by an overprotective computer. Switch freely between their two stories, combining objects to solve puzzles, in a hand-painted point-and-click adventure — built in two acts by Tim Schafer's Double Fine on crowdfunded money.
puzzleadventurepoint-and-clickThe Past Within
A point-and-click adventure playable only by two people at once: one stands in the Past, the other in the Future, and every puzzle is solved by describing aloud what only your own screen shows. The past is drawn in 2D, the future in 3D. Rusty Lake's first co-op-only game.
puzzleco-opescape-roomGone Home
A first-person exploration game: home on a rainy night in June 1995 after a year abroad, you open every door and drawer of an empty house and reconstruct a year of family history from the letters, cassettes and magazines left behind. No combat, no puzzles, no fail state — the verbs are open, pick up, read. The first game from Fullbright, founded by veterans of BioShock.
explorationobservationmysteryThe Room 4: Old Sins
A first-person contraption puzzler set inside an old dollhouse found in an attic: open the mechanism in one room, then carry what you find to the room that is missing a piece. The fourth entry in Fireproof Games' The Room series, rebuilt for PC.
puzzleobservationmysteryThe Vanishing of Ethan Carter
A first-person mystery in which you play an occult detective, walking a deserted valley to examine bodies and belongings and reassemble each death by putting the scattered fragments back in order — a photogrammetry-built forest explored with no map and no HUD, from The Astronauts.
investigationobservationnarrative-puzzleWilmot's Warehouse
A 2D organisation puzzle: push the delivered goods into your warehouse and file them however you decide. No rule governs the shelves, and when the service hatch opens you retrieve orders from memory alone. By Richard Hogg and Ricky Haggett, who previously made Hohokum, with 200 kinds of pictorial tile piling up.
puzzleobservationsimulationMoncage
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-clickMyst
A first-person puzzle adventure: you arrive on an unknown island and move between an abandoned library and four Ages, piecing together a story of family betrayal from machines and journals alone. Cyan Worlds' own Unreal Engine rebuild of their 1993 original, walkable flat or in VR, with optional puzzle randomization.
puzzleadventurefirst-personGenesis 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-clickThe Room Two
A first-person escape puzzler in which you peer at, rotate, and pry open strange clockwork boxes, using a special lens to reveal hidden marks. The second Room game widens from a single box to several interlocking contraptions, from the UK studio Fireproof Games.
puzzlemysteryobservationTangle Tower
A hand-drawn, fully voiced detective adventure: a painter's murder in a strange mansion, solved by interrogating suspects, pairing the clues you gather, and cracking the puzzles hidden through the tower. SFB Games' 2019 follow-up to Detective Grimoire.
puzzlemysteryadventureQuern - Undying Thoughts
A first-person puzzle adventure: stranded on an island with no way back, you open some fifty doors by working gears, crystals and alchemy, and solved contraptions return, reused, so the whole island reads as one machine. A 2016 homage to Myst and Riven from the four-person studio Zadbox.
puzzleadventuremysteryChinatown Detective Agency
A cybernoir point-and-click set in near-future Singapore, where you run a detective agency and crack international cases by researching real facts in a browser outside the game. General Interactive Co.'s experiment hands the last step of every clue to the live web.
deductionobservationmysteryThe Room Three
A first-person escape puzzler set in a mansion on a remote island, where you peer through a lens at the boxes and mechanisms left by the Craftsman, uncovering hidden layers one at a time. The third Room game expands the series from a single box to a whole estate, built on one tactile verb and an eyepiece that multiplies what you can observe.
escape-roommysteryobservationDuck Detective: The Secret Salami
A 2.5D observation-and-deduction adventure where a down-on-his-luck duck detective peers at evidence and slots words into fill-in-the-blank sentences to crack the case of a stolen lunch. Happy Broccoli Games takes the Golden Idol style and makes it light, fully voiced, and pun-heavy.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzleRiven
Cyan Worlds' own ground-up 3D remake of the 1997 classic — a first-person puzzle adventure with no hints and no highlighting, where you walk a collapsing island and read its water, machines and D'ni number system to unlock its secrets.
puzzleadventureDo Not Feed the Monkeys
A digital voyeur simulator: watch strangers - 'monkeys' - through surveillance cameras, pick clues from their rooms and talk, and pin down who they are with a notepad and a search engine. Blackmail, help, or look away, all while juggling rent, food and sleep. A game by Fictiorama Studios.
observationdeductionsimulationLucifer Within Us
An isometric detective game where you scrub testimony timelines and jab at contradictions to solve murders, piecing together motive, means, and opportunity in a daemon-haunted theocracy — from Kitfox Games.
mysteryobservationnarrative-puzzleThe Looker
A first-person puzzler where you wake on a strangely familiar island and clear line-drawing panels — built entirely to parody The Witness. A free, roughly two-hour piece by Subcreation Studio.
puzzleobservationfirst-personHidden Folks
A 2D hidden-object puzzle set in hand-drawn, monochrome miniature landscapes you unfurl, cut through, and poke to uncover the folks tucked inside. Every sound is made by human mouths, across 32 areas with 300+ things to find.
hidden-objectobservationpoint-and-clickThe Sexy Brutale
At a masked ball, the guests are murdered one by one by the mansion's staff across a twelve-hour loop that resets each midnight. As a bystander in a bloodstained mask you eavesdrop from the shadows and wind the clock back and forth to read the choreography of each killing, then intervene before the victim dies. An isometric mystery puzzle by Cavalier Game Studios and Tequila Works.
puzzlemysteryadventurePneuma: Breath of Life
A first-person puzzler in a Greco-Roman temple where you solve by choosing what to look at — eyes on pillars, tiles that flip the moment you glance away. A 2015 game by Deco Digital / Bevel Studios built on observation as its verb, narrated throughout by the self-styled creator-god Pneuma.
puzzlefirst-personThe Gardens Between
A time-manipulation puzzle in which two arrow keys and one action button rewind and advance time as Arina and Frendt climb islands of memory. You move time itself rather than the characters, unspooling wordless scenes of childhood. From The Voxel Agents.
puzzleadventuretime-manipulationA Little to the Left
A cozy observation puzzle where you drag and drop scattered household objects into the arrangement that just feels right — finding the hidden order of size, colour, and count across 100+ little messes, while a cat occasionally undoes your work. The debut from Max Inferno.
puzzleobservationlogicThe Painscreek Killings
A first-person detective game in which you play a journalist combing the abandoned town of Painscreek — hunting keys, notes and diaries to solve a cold murder case. No quest markers, no hint system; your own notebook is the only tool. Made and published in 2017 by EQ Studios.
investigationobservationnarrative-puzzleThe Room
A first-person puzzler in which you peer at, rotate, and pry open a strange metal box one mechanism at a time. A special lens reveals marks invisible to the naked eye, and each box yields a smaller one within. Fireproof Games' tactile puzzle box, built around looking closely and touching.
puzzlemysteryIsles of Sea and Sky
A memory-less castaway pushes blocks — and only pushes them — through traps and portals across an open ocean of islands. Each island twists one mechanic while a wordless myth unfolds, growing a bottomless labyrinth from one verb. From Cicada Games.
puzzlesokoban-likeexplorationTelling Lies
An FMV mystery where you search a database of secretly recorded video by the words spoken in it, reassembling four lives and one big lie from fragments. From Sam Barlow of Her Story, built on a single verb — search — that takes stories apart and rebuilds them.
narrative-puzzleobservationmysteryThe Rise of the Golden Idol
A 2D deduction adventure where you click through frozen crime scenes and drop harvested words into blanks to reconstruct who did what, why, and in what order. A standalone sequel to The Case of the Golden Idol, set across twenty linked cases in the 1970s.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzleCall of the Sea
A first-person adventure puzzler set in the 1930s South Pacific, where Norah lands on an unknown island chasing her husband's lost expedition, reading journals and inscriptions and turning devices to unlock its secrets — Out of the Blue's Lovecraftian entry in the Myst lineage.
puzzleadventurefirst-personBotany Manor
A first-person puzzle set in an 1890s English manor, where you play retired botanist Arabella Greene and deduce each forgotten plant's ideal growing conditions from letters, posters, and clippings to coax it into bloom. Reading clues and binding them to a herbarium page is the core verb.
puzzlefirst-personUnderstand
A mouse-only minimalist puzzle where each level hides a ruleset: you draw a single line, read which rules it satisfied, and deduce the hidden rules themselves. Almost no instructions, you advance on hypothesis and refutation alone. By Artless Games, 2020.
puzzlelogic-deductionobservationThe Roottrees are Dead
A first-person deduction puzzle: scour the early, dial-up-era Internet plus books and articles to establish who is truly blood-related to a crashed dynasty, filling in the blanks of their family tree. Evil Trout Inc.'s reworking of a free Global Game Jam browser game.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzleIMMORTALITY
An FMV adventure built from the unreleased films of vanished actress Marissa Marcel. Pause the footage, click a face or an object to match-cut into another clip, and assemble the fragments to chase her disappearance. From Her Story's Sam Barlow, who reworks the verb 'search' from text into the visual.
fmvmysteryobservationObduction
Touch an artifact that falls from the night sky by a lake and you are flung to an alien landscape stitched from fragments of Earth across times and places. Walk, observe, and solve the machinery linking world to world to find your way home—a first-person adventure from Cyan, the studio behind Myst, that makes observation its only verb.
puzzleadventurefirst-personFEZ
An exploration platformer where you rotate a 2D world in 90-degree turns, shifting how the plane reads to connect platforms. Collect cube fragments while wandering a crumbling world — Polytron Corporation's signature take on rotation.
puzzle-platformerexplorationobservationTaiji
A grid-based logic puzzle in the lineage of The Witness: toggle tiles on panels by deducing unwritten rules through pure observation, as you roam a quiet open world.
observationlogic-gridopen-worldIslands of Insight
A sprawling open-world puzzle game with thousands of hand-crafted puzzles — line-drawing, observation, logic — scattered across a fantasy realm to solve at your own pace.
puzzleopen-worldlogicThe Case of the Golden Idol
A deduction game: examine frozen crime-scene tableaus, gather words from the evidence, and fill in the blanks to reconstruct each murder across an 18th-century mystery.
deductionobservationnarrative-puzzleChants of Sennaar
Climbing a Babel-like tower, you decipher the unknown logographic language of each floor's people from pictures and gestures. A game of observation and inference.
observationnarrative-puzzlemeta-puzzleAntichamber
A first-person puzzler in white walls and black lines that treats non-Euclidean space itself as a grammar.
observationmeta-puzzlefirst-personA Monster's Expedition
Push trees to make logs and bridge to the next island. An open-world Sokoban.
sokoban-likeobservationLorelei and the Laser Eyes
In an eerie monochrome hotel, over 150 ciphers, numbers, and symbol puzzles weave through every floor.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzleUnpacking
Pull things from boxes and place them on shelves. A 'life-told-by-objects' puzzle.
assemblynarrative-puzzleobservationOuter Wilds
Explore a solar system on a 22-minute loop and unravel the mysteries of an ancient race.
narrative-puzzleobservationmeta-puzzleReturn of the Obra Dinn
A monochrome mystery where an insurance assessor must identify sixty crew and reconstruct their fates aboard a ghost ship.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzleGorogoa
A hand-drawn 2×2 grid of paintings. Rearrange, zoom, connect — a picture-book puzzle.
observationassemblynarrative-puzzleThe Witness
More than five hundred line-drawing panels. Observation itself becomes the verb.
observationnarrative-puzzlepathfindingHer Story
Search a police database of live-action video clips to reconstruct the story of a missing husband. An FMV mystery.
narrative-puzzleobservationmeta-puzzlePapers, Please
A border inspector in a fictional authoritarian state, caught between paperwork and morality.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzlePortal 2
Gels and lasers expand the portal vocabulary into a larger, co-op-ready peak of the genre.
physicspathfindingobservationLIMBO
A boy walks through a monochrome forest searching for his sister. Trial and death advance the way.
physicsobservationnarrative-puzzleMachinarium
In a town built of scrap, a small robot rescues his lover. A hand-drawn, dialogue-free adventure.
narrative-puzzleassemblyobservationPortal
Rewriting space itself with a portal gun. The textbook for 3D puzzle design.
physicspathfindingobservationPsychonauts
Dive into other characters' minds and solve the puzzles their inner worlds present. A peculiar 3D adventure.
narrative-puzzleobservationassemblySyberia II
Kate and the automaton Oscar travel into frozen Russia for one final leg of the journey.
narrative-puzzleassemblyobservationZuma Deluxe
Fire same-color balls into an Aztec-themed snake's path to clear them. PopCap's golden-era action puzzle.
matchobservationSyberia
Lawyer Kate Walker crosses Europe and Russia, unraveling the mystery of the automata.
narrative-puzzleassemblyobservationMyst III: Exile
A canonical Myst sequel across six Ages. The first to introduce 360-degree free view.
logic-gridobservationnarrative-puzzleEscape from Monkey Island
Pirate Guybrush's last classic, the era of 3D LucasArts adventure, with wildly inventive item combinations.
narrative-puzzleassemblyobservation
