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Happy Game
A point-and-click adventure that walks a sleeping boy through three chapters of nightmare. You pull, turn and pick at the screen to open the way forward, and what waits there is smiley faces, pink bunnies and rooms the colour of blood. Amanita Design's first turn toward horror, scored by the Czech band DVA.
puzzlepoint-and-clickadventureISLANDERS
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.
puzzlestrategyminimalistEliza
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-novelnarrativeadventureMini 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.
puzzleminimalistsimulationCHUCHEL
A comedy adventure from Amanita Design in which a hairy little creature chases a single cherry through thirty short stages, helped and hindered by his rival Kekel. There is exactly one verb — click — and behind almost every press waits a hand-drawn gag.
puzzlepoint-and-clickcomedyMini 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.
puzzleminimalistsimulationTetrobot and Co.
A grid-based thinking puzzle in which you steer Psychobot, a microscopic repair robot, swallowing and spitting blocks to mend the insides of a broken giant. Swing Swing Submarine build fifty-odd levels out of little more than three materials — wood, sand, stone — and one rule: like sticks only to like.
puzzlelogicsokoban-likeOrwell: 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-puzzlesimulationWorld of Goo 2
A sequel to the physics-building puzzler: grab black goo balls, link them into bridges and towers, and route them to the exit pipe. New goo species that stretch, shrink and explode join liquid that runs downhill and pools, across five chapters and sixty-plus levels. From 2D BOY and Tomorrow Corporation.
physicspuzzleassemblyMonument Valley
An optical-illusion puzzler in which you walk the silent princess Ida across isometric monuments, rotating the view until disconnected paths look joined — and become joined. The PC edition of ustwo games' 2014 mobile release, with the extra chapters included.
puzzleperspective-puzzleminimalistSamorost 3
A point-and-click adventure across nine tiny worlds with no dialogue and no text, where a hooded figure carries a found brass flute and opens the way by playing notes at rocks, creatures and machines. From Amanita Design, the studio behind Machinarium.
puzzlepoint-and-clickexplorationPaper Trail
A top-down puzzle game in which the screen is a sheet of paper: fold it over and the terrain on the reverse joins the front, building a path for Paige as she journeys through a hand-drawn world. From Newfangled Games.
puzzleadventurepathfindingUnderstand
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-deductionobservationCosmic Express
A route-drawing puzzle: lay down train tracks to pick up and drop off cute alien passengers in the right order, fitting one winding path into a tight grid.
puzzlepathfindingsokoban-likeUnpacking
Pull things from boxes and place them on shelves. A 'life-told-by-objects' puzzle.
assemblynarrative-puzzleobservationReturn 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-puzzleHer 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-puzzleMachinarium
In a town built of scrap, a small robot rescues his lover. A hand-drawn, dialogue-free adventure.
narrative-puzzleassemblyobservationWorld of Goo
Stack squishy goo balls into bridges and towers to deliver them to the goal. Physics building.
physicsassemblySyberia 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.
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