This is a showcase looking at my (Josh Bycer’s) favorite demos from Cerebral Puzzle Showcase June 2025 Edition.

00:00 Intro
00:20 Öoo
1:50 Node: The Last Favor of the Antarii
3:56 Puzzle Depot
5:37 The Button Effect
07:17 Trackastrophe
8:40 Glowkeeper
10:15 Looking for Fael
12:05 Miss Paint
13:37 Chipwits

I’d like to point out that Chipwits is a game we’ve covered here before!

In other news… itch.io has come under a firestorm over the past couple of days over their delisting a whole bunch of games that covered adult subjects because of pressure from their payment processors. As it turns out, those processors themselves have been targeted by a campaign from right-wing “Christian” organization Collective Shout. I have tried to prioritize links to itch.io, and even distribute software and books through that site, but now I’m going to have to think hard about alternatives. PCGamer has a good overview of the situation.

Josh Bycer

Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”

game-wisdom.com/

You devise programs using a graphic interface to get a robot character through a maze-like grid world to do various things. The original Chipwits was written for the original Mac, in Forth, with ports for different machines of the time. The new game has a nice tutorial as well as new scenarios, in addition to the scenarios that came with the original game.

The thing I like about Chipwits is, it isn’t always about solving specific puzzles. Many of the maps are open-ended. The robots have a limited amount of fuel, which translates into machine cycles to run your programs. Additional fuel can be replenished by objects found in their exploration, as well as objects worth score, but the objects are frequently randomly placed. These scenarios aren’t about tailoring a program to a specific placement objects, but devising a more generalized exploration routine that can adapt to a variety of placements. There are online leaderboards so you can see how your coding skill compares with that of other players.

Chipwits usually goes for $15, but for launch is currently 10% off on Steam. (Disclaimer: I interviewed the Chipwits people for Game Developer previously, and did a little beta testing, but I bought my own copy of the game for these screenshots. They deserve the money!)

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