Inside Simon Flesser's Philosophy — Move the Difficulty Out of the Controls and Into the Puzzle

Introduction

Simon Flesser is one half of Simogo, the two-person studio in Malmö, Sweden. Outside the indie-puzzle circle he is still more often identified by his games than by name: DEVICE 6 (2013), the typographic novel-puzzle for iOS, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (2024), the mystery-puzzle game that took Thinky Awards Game of the Year for 2024 (Wikipedia).

I put him on the desk now because of Simogo Legacy Collection, released in 2025, which finally gathered the studio's early work into one window. With fifteen years of output visible at once, you can lay the statements side by side.

The first thing that snagged me was a pair of remarks that look like a contradiction. "We wanted anyone who had never held a controller to be able to play this game" (TouchArcade, 2024). About the same game, in another interview, he describes the difficulty of his own puzzles as "Very difficult" (Screen Rant, 2024). This is a study of how those two live together.

Background — fifteen years, starting from one platform

Simogo was founded in 2010 in Malmö by Simon Flesser and Magnus "Gordon" Gardebäck (Wikipedia). The studio's own self-description is short: "We're driven by the curiosity to explore interesting and surprising ideas" and "We create all kinds of games, for all kinds of platforms" (Simogo, About). Note what is absent — no genre, no platform, no house style.

The early years were iOS-only: Kosmo Spin (2010), Bumpy Road (2011), Beat Sneak Bandit (2012). 2013 was the pivot, with Year Walk (Swedish folklore) and DEVICE 6 (a labyrinth made out of typography) in the same year; DEVICE 6 won an Apple Design Award and the IGF audio award. Then SPL-T (2015), a pure abstract puzzle about splitting blocks; Sayonara Wild Hearts (2019, BAFTA for Artistic Achievement); Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (2024) (Wikipedia).

The range is unusually wide. Flesser, though, talks about it as if it needed no defending. On Year Walk abandoning the brightness of everything before it: "we just create the things that we want to create and we had talked about doing something that felt a little more serious or perhaps dark for quite a while" (GodisaGeek, 2013).

Philosophy — making what no one else is making, as a work ethic

One claim has not moved in over a decade: the goal is to make unique things. In 2013, asked what Simogo was aiming for, Flesser answered in five words: "To make unique things, I think" (Pocket Gamer, 2013). In 2024 he restated it more personally: "Personally, I also want to make things that feel relevant, and for me that is to make things that no one else is making" (Hardcore Gamer, 2024).

What interests me is that he frames this less as artistic ambition than as occupational health. From the same interview: "You want to try and find ways to make your work feel fulfilling, create things that surprise yourself" (Hardcore Gamer, 2024). Surprising yourself is stated as a working condition. Simogo's record of never making a sequel reads as a consequence of that condition rather than as a manifesto.

The inverse shows up once, plainly, as a criticism of the industry: "I think that is one of the biggest problems of the gaming industry. It's culturally feeding itself, which in turns makes it uninteresting for people without a gaming background" (GodisaGeek, 2013). Games feeding on games produces work with nothing to offer anyone outside game culture — the same root, I would argue, as the accessibility obsession discussed below.

And he absorbs the cost himself. Asked whether a commercially awkward design like DEVICE 6 worried him: "Not worried, no. Although we were sure about the game's qualities and uniqueness, we were prepared for it to get a slightly more modest commercial reception" (Pocket Gamer, 2013).

Obsessions — distrusting controls, and the distance you place a cipher at

The first recurring habit is distrust of control schemes. In 2024: "We always want to try and challenge established control-standards, and explore how things could be done differently" (TouchArcade, 2024). The habit is visible from 2013, when he dismissed the on-screen d-pads of the era outright: "I wish virtual buttons could just dissappear and never be seen again" (GodisaGeek, 2013).

Hating buttons is not yet a design. What he puts in their place is weight: "We want the game to feel deliberate, and players to commit to their choices" (TouchArcade, 2024). Notably, the one-button scheme was salvage from the previous project — "The one-button approach was formed during Sayonara Wild Hearts as I was testing sections" (Hardcore Gamer, 2024). A by-product of one game became the spine of the next.

The second obsession is the distance at which a cipher is placed. This is where he opens his hand furthest, so I quote it whole: "The bigger puzzles would have their cipher distributed throughout the game, whereas the puzzles leading to that cipher should always have the clues close at hand" (Screen Rant, 2024). Big locks get their keys scattered across the world; the small puzzles that lead to those keys keep their materials within reach. Difficulty designed as distance rather than as a number.

His stated private taste meshes with that structure: "I like symmetry and I like when you find symmetry between things" (Screen Rant, 2024). The symmetry you find is the moment two distant things turn out to rhyme — which is precisely what distance is for.

Failures, and how he takes them

Start with a weakness he admits himself: colour. "I'm not very good at colors and struggled a lot with them during Sayonara Wild Hearts" (Hardcore Gamer, 2024) — said of the game that won a BAFTA for Artistic Achievement. His verdict on that project overall: "Sayonara Wild Hearts was a tough project," against Lorelei, which was "mostly a joy for the team to work on" (TouchArcade, 2024).

There is also a self-criticism about his own puzzles. On Year Walk in 2013: "If anything I think we might have made some of the puzzles a little on the easy side" (GodisaGeek, 2013). Set that next to "Very difficult" eleven years later (Screen Rant, 2024) and a line through the career appears. Not a contradiction — a debt from 2013 being collected.

The largest failure, though, sat outside the work. Because the early canon was iOS-only, it lived under permanent threat: "For many years we have talked about how we should approach the issue of preserving our mobile games, which are in constant danger of disappearing or ending up being unplayable with new OS versions or hardware configurations" (Simogo Legacy Collection).

The response is characteristic: he did not remake them. "We quickly came to the conclusion that this approach would not only be very time consuming—it wouldn't serve the actual purpose, which was to preserve our games" (ibid.). And here 2013 pays off, because back then he had already said of revising released work: "I think updates and changing games can sometimes feel a bit revisionistic" (GodisaGeek, 2013). Twelve years later, with his own catalogue disappearing, he held the principle and chose relocation over revision.

Dilemmas — putting "anyone can play" and "very difficult" in the same box

Back to the apparent contradiction. "We wanted anyone who had never held a controller to be able to play this game" (TouchArcade, 2024) versus "Very difficult" (Screen Rant, 2024). Flesser's own gloss on the first: "One of the factors is that we want everyone to be able to play. You're sort of creating an even playground for players that have played games for a lot of — for all of their lives, and players that have never played a game before" (Screen Rant, 2024). Even playground is the operative phrase. What he is levelling is not puzzle difficulty but the advantage conferred by a lifetime of controller literacy. So the controls shrink to one button and the entire difficulty budget moves to the puzzles. The two statements are not reconciled — they are assigned to different places.

The second dilemma has no consensus answer: is a player consulting a walkthrough a design failure? His answer surprised me. "We think it's interesting if players need to understand the puzzles, even if they are looking at guides" (Screen Rant, 2024) — the sense being that even handed the answer, you still have to understand it to use it. Rather than hiding solutions harder, he made solutions insufficient on their own.

The third is the tuning he openly calls hard: "Very difficult. It's about communicating an idea, and you need to have the players understand how this stuff is connected, but you don't want to make it too obvious" (Screen Rant, 2024). Note the referent — what is very difficult there is the design work, not the puzzle. He restates it elsewhere more mechanically: "Creating and tuning them ultimately becomes a communication challenge, in which you tweak how much of the information you can obfuscate" (Hardcore Gamer, 2024).

And he does not describe the goal of that work as difficulty: "Creating these types of cipher puzzles is maybe not so much about making them challenging as much as it is about making them interesting" (Hardcore Gamer, 2024). His success criterion is not a completion rate either: "That it makes people think about things, and have ideas about things" (Screen Rant, 2024).

The fourth is his workaround for the stuck player: "Even though the puzzles are difficult, you never get stuck"; "There is always something new to do. And the more you discover, the more you will understand how everything is connected" (TouchArcade, 2024). No hint system — instead, another door always open. Remove the deadlock without lowering the difficulty.

Influences — the ones he acknowledges

For Lorelei he lists his sources unusually concretely: "Films like L'Année dernière à Marienbad, books like the Magus, the work of Paul Auster and videogames like traditional adventure games and Resident Evil, Zelda and Metroid" (TouchArcade, 2024). Elsewhere he weights the film heavily: "The 1961 film L'année dernière à Marienbad was one of the biggest inspirations for the game" (Hardcore Gamer, 2024). Resnais and Fowles — works in which the order of time and memory comes apart.

From the novelist he took a specific technique: "The way Paul Auster describes fictional media within itself was inspirational" (Hardcore Gamer, 2024). Auster's fictional books and films inside books. A mansion stuffed with documents and screenings follows from that citation.

Among developers he named exactly one, back in 2013: Japan's CiNG (Another Code, Hotel Dusk). "I really love how CiNG breaks down the borders between the player and the game by integrating the hardware into the story and puzzles" (Pocket Gamer, 2013). DEVICE 6 asking you to rotate the device, listen to the speaker, and treat screen orientation as part of the puzzle has its origin stated right there.

And one reference that runs backwards: "We were also inspired generally by the trend of open world games, but we instead wanted to try and create an intimate world, instead of open" (TouchArcade, 2024). What he took from the trend was not a direction but an antonym — intimate, chosen against open.

Kizuki's reading — difficulty as a coordinate, not a character trait

What follows is my own reading, not his words. Laying out fifteen years of Flesser, what I take away is that he treats difficulty as a coordinate on the board rather than as the personality of the game. For most designers difficulty is a temperament — generous or unforgiving. In his phrasing it is always converted into a question of placement: keys far, materials near; difficulty pulled out of the controls and pushed into the puzzles; deadlock removed by another open door rather than by a hint. When he says "very difficult" he does not mean difficult for the fingers or for the patience — he means the distance between two things that rhyme. And his own criterion for success was not that people solved it but that it made them "think about things, and have ideas about things" (Screen Rant, 2024). If that is the goal, then the solution was never the destination; it was the signal that the symmetry had been noticed.

Closing — where to start

If you pick one game to understand him, take DEVICE 6: the 2013 piece that made a labyrinth out of typography, where the CiNG influence — hardware folded into story and puzzle — is most exposed. It was iOS-only and close to unplayable for years; it is now in the Simogo Legacy Collection. For puzzle density go to Lorelei and the Laser Eyes; for the bare skeleton of an abstract puzzle, SPL-T (2015).

Among the studies already on this site, the ones that rhyme are Ken Wong on compressing a world into a single screen, Jakub Dvorský on discarding language, and Andrew Shouldice on designing the time in which the player does not yet understand — the last of which can be read directly against Flesser on the question of the stuck player.

The tea has gone cold. It was a good day's work simply to confirm that a note-to-self written in 2013 was collected in a game released in 2024.

Sources

Primary sources used in this article:

・TouchArcade, "Simogo 2024 Interview: Co-Founder Simon Flesser on Lorelei and the Laser Eyes...", 15 May 2024

・Screen Rant, "Lorelei And The Laser Eyes Interview: Crafting A Stylish Puzzle Game From Scraps" (interview with Simon Flesser), 2024

・Screen Rant, "Lorelei And The Laser Eyes Makes A Hard Game Easier With This Feature" (comments by Simon Flesser), 2024

・Hardcore Gamer, "Simogo's Simon Flesser Discusses Inspiration, Design, Fulfillment in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes", 2024

・Pocket Gamer, "Simogo's Simon Flesser - 'We tend to do things our way'" (DEVICE 6 era), 2013

・GodisaGeek, "Interview: Year Walk Developer Simogo Co-Founder Simon Flesser", April 2013

・Simogo, "About Simogo" (the studio's own description)

・Simogo, "Simogo Legacy Collection" (the studio's own statement on preservation)

Secondary references:

・Wikipedia, "Simogo" (founding year, game list, awards)

・Simogo, "The Sensational December Machine" (the 2014 short project)