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Tactical Breach Wizards
A turn-based tactical puzzle in which a squad of wizards in body armour clears a building one room at a time. Every shot lands, nothing is random, and you can rewind as many turns as you like. From Suspicious Developments, the studio behind Gunpoint.
puzzlestrategynarrative-puzzleshapez 2
A 3D factory-building puzzle: mine geometric shapes, carry them on belts, and combine cutting, rotating, stacking and painting until they match the order. No enemies, no time limits and no building costs — just platforms scattered across three layers of space, in tobspr Games' sequel to shapez.
puzzleautomationsandboxSUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE
The sequel to SUPERHOT, the first-person action puzzle where time only moves when you move. It drops the hand-built one-screen levels for randomly dealt rooms fought in runs, and adds abilities you pick up along the way. The third game from SUPERHOT Team.
puzzlefirst-persontime-manipulationDesktop Dungeons: Rewind
A turn-based puzzle-roguelike on a single screen of dungeon, where revealing unexplored tiles is what heals you, so every fight is a resource problem. QCF Design's 3D remake of their 2013 Desktop Dungeons, with a rewind for taking moves back and the kingdom-building layer carried over.
puzzleroguelikestrategyBombe
A logic puzzle where you do not clear the Minesweeper board yourself: you write rules that act on the numbered regions, and a checker verifies them. Rules that pass are applied automatically to every board from then on, leaving only the situations no rule has reached. A solo project by Charlie Brej.
puzzlelogicautomationISLANDERS
A minimalist placement puzzle: drop buildings onto procedurally generated islands and score them by whatever sits nearby. No resource management, no citizens — one verb, "place." A small release from Grizzly Games.
puzzlestrategyminimalistAutonauts
An automation puzzle in which you land on an empty planet, chop and quarry by hand, and then teach robots the steps you just performed so they can do them for you. With short Scratch-style scripts and one small memory allowance per bot, you grow a production line from farming to industry. Made by Denki, in Scotland.
puzzleprogrammingautomationBridge Constructor Portal
A 2D physics puzzler in which you build bridges and ramps across 60 Aperture Science test chambers and thread vehicles through fixed portals and gels to the exit. ClockStone's entry in the Bridge Constructor series, built with Portal's own art and lore on loan from Valve.
puzzlephysicssimulationMini Motorways
A minimalist 2D puzzle game in which you draw roads, one at a time, through a city that keeps sprouting colour-coded houses and destinations. Each week you are handed a motorway, a roundabout or a traffic light to spend, and you keep redrawing the network until the traffic finally seizes up. From Dinosaur Polo Club, the New Zealand studio behind Mini Metro.
puzzleminimalistsimulationSUPERHOT
A first-person shooter built from white rooms and red figures, where the world's time advances only as far as you move. You take your weapons from the enemies who drop them, and a single hit ends the level. Grown by SUPERHOT Team out of a game-jam prototype.
puzzlefirst-persontime-manipulationMini Metro
A 2D minimalist puzzler in which you draw subway lines between circle, triangle and square stations in a growing city, allocating the carriages and tunnels handed to you each week, and keep the city moving until the platforms overflow. From New Zealand's Dinosaur Polo Club, grown out of a game-jam prototype.
puzzleminimalistsimulationshapez
A 2D automation puzzler where you mine simple shapes, carry them on belts, and combine cutting, rotating, stacking and painting to build whatever each level orders, growing a factory across an endlessly expanding blank map. tobspr Games' Steam build of what began as a free browser game.
puzzleautomationsandboxDorfromantik
A hand-painted tile-placement puzzler: draw one hexagonal tile at a time and rotate it so its forests, fields, houses, rivers and rails line up with their neighbours. Complete quests to win tiles back and keep the village landscape growing, in Berlin studio Toukana Interactive's debut.
puzzlelogicminimalistThe Signal State
A 2D logic puzzler where you slot modules — AND, NOT, attenuators, sample-and-hold — into a rack and patch them with cables carrying voltages from -100 to 100 until the output waveform matches the spec. Reckoner Industries builds it on modular synthesis, framed as repairing the irrigation of a ruined farm.
puzzleprogramminglogicKaizen: A Factory Story
A 2D automation puzzle set in 1986 Japan: lay arms and tracks across a green workbench, program a timeline of commands, and build assembly lines for calculators, camcorders and arcade cabinets. Made by the original Zachtronics team under their new studio Coincidence, with a pachinko-flavoured solitaire on the side.
puzzleautomationprogrammingSilicon Zeroes
An open-ended puzzle set in a 1960s Silicon Valley startup, where you wire simple parts — adders, multiplexers, latches — into a working CPU with instruction decoding and pipelining. From PleasingFungus Games, maker of Manufactoria, a CPU-design game that hides the bits and shows only how the parts behave.
puzzleprogramminglogicMOLEK-SYNTEZ
In a cramped 2092 Romanian apartment, you program a home-built synthesizer to turn benzene and acetone into small pharmacological molecules — a Zachtronics optimization puzzle you operate only from the edges of a finite board.
puzzlesimulationTIS-100
An assembly-language programming puzzle: you write code across a grid of tiny parallel nodes to repair a broken computer. Each node holds two registers and barely a dozen instructions, and passing data between nodes can deadlock — inside those constraints you compete on cycles, instructions and node count. From Zachtronics, makers of SpaceChem and Opus Magnum.
puzzleprogramminglogicHuman Resource Machine
A puzzle game where you feed a dozen commands to a tiny office worker between an inbox and an outbox, building 'programs' from sorts to multiplication to prime factorization. From World of Goo's Tomorrow Corporation, it hands you assembly-style thinking via drag-and-drop.
puzzleprogramminglogicInfinifactory
A first-person 3D puzzle where you build factories from blocks and conveyors to assemble whatever your alien captors order. SpaceChem made three-dimensional: a tiny verb set opening onto bottomless optimisation, from Zachtronics.
puzzleautomationprogrammingSHENZHEN I/O
A programming puzzle in which you play an engineer at a fictional Shenzhen firm, writing terse assembly for cramped virtual microcontrollers and wiring circuits onto a board to build client products. Zachtronics ships no tutorial — its 30-plus-page datasheet manual is the first puzzle.
puzzleprogrammingoptimizationOpus Magnum
A 2D puzzle where, in an alchemist's workshop, you combine rotating and extending arms with tracks to ferry and bond atoms into potions and metals. The board and part count are unlimited, so the contest is less about clearing than about how elegantly, quickly, and compactly you build — Zachtronics' signature work.
puzzleprogrammingautomationSpaceChem
A 2D puzzle where you program two 'waldos' to grab, carry, and bond atoms, building factories that turn raw molecules into products. You don't find a solution — you build one. The design-based puzzle that launched Zachtronics.
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