Tag: puzzle

Gamefinds: Soko Striker

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Pointed out in a post on Metafilter by long-time user pwnguin, Soko Striker is fun, and not excessively challenging, free Soccer-themed Sokoban game by Axylaric on itch.io.

The idea is to get all the balls (up to three in a level) into the goal net. The ball slides when you kick it, continuing to move until something interacts with it. We could call these “ice block” style Sokoban pieces. One wrinkle in this is that the balls can’t cross the white lines at the edges of the board, or it’s a foul and you have to start over. There is no undo command, only a retry, so think carefully before making a move. You yourself can walk outside the line freely, and will often have to.

Those yellow barriers in the screenshot above are simple blockers, mere walls that the ball will collide with and come to a halt.

Later on you find these other players on the checkerboard pitch. If the ball rolls into an arrow, the player will automatically kick it in that arrow’s facing direction. You can adjust the direction a player faces by kicking them, a trick you’ll have to use a lot.

Near the end of the game’s 30 puzzles you’ll find these traffic cones. You can push them a single space at a time by kicking them, much like how one would move a Sokoban crate. Other players can kick crates too. A cone can block a ball and stop it a single time.

There’s a few other tricks you’ll have to learn too, but Soko Striker introduces them to you itself fairly gradually. Many of its puzzles are simple tutorials, and the difficulty doesn’t get very high until near the end. The last puzzle will take you at least a few minutes to figure out, but I think you can probably handle it. One note that might be helpful: the scoreboard that shows you the level number looks as if it might be solid and block soccer balls, but it doesn’t. You can even walk through it! That’ll be helpful to you eventually.

Soko Striker by Axylaric (itch.io, $0)

High-Level Minesweeper Tactics by Mine Bouy

Mine Bouy is a sporadically-posting Minesweeper enthusiast who posts interesting strategies sometimes, including one video about dealing with one of the most frustrating, yet sadly common, events in playing that game: “fifty-fifties,” or, situations where you have a choice of two spaces to reveal, and the chances that one will contain a mine losing you the game is ½ out of 1.

This situation may seem impossible to resolve, and it’s true that you have some chance of losing no matter how you deal with it. But there are sometimes ways to improve your odds and clear up the uncertainty without making a move that’s a 50% chance of losing. Mine Bouy calls this “breaking a 50/50.” (8 minutes)

Their strategy has to do with not picking one of the two questionable spots if you can help it. It relies on realizing that picking an adjacent spot with lower odds of failure may give you a chance to give you information that could reveal which spot has the mine. It trades even odds of exploding a mine with a greater chance that a spot is mine-free, and also revealing which of the 50/50 spots hides the boobytrap. Clever!

Two other helps linked from the video’s description are a browser-based Minesweeper analysis tool by MSCoach, which offers a no guessing mode that guarentees no 50/50s will be generated, and a Google Docs paper (by Scar) on the basics of 50/50s and the many forms they may take. You can play Minesweeper on the internet at Minesweeper Online, which also offers a no-guessing option.

Gamefinds: Games Don’t Have To Be Good To Be Good

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

sylvie’s Games Don’t Have To Be Good To Be Good is an interesting little browser game where the point is figuring out how to play, then what to do. It’s really short! You can probably finish it in five minutes.

The description calls it a manifesto, and I can see that, and also agree with it. (And it’s an entry in Manifestø Jam 2026 too.) My belief about game worth is that there can be a hundred things wrong with a game, and everyone can agree that they’re wrong, but if there’s one really really good thing about it, just one powerful elemental spark of awesome, if it’s strong enough, it can make all the “wrong” things meaningless.

It’s points to one of the great problems with game journalism as it’s currently practiced. The traditional lists of flaws, the reporting of how “smooth” it is, of how realistic the polygons are and the other excuses a reviewer gives not to play something, none of those things matter. Not if the game has something really good going for it, and to obsess over trivialities will blind you to many worthwhile things.

It’s why it took forever to get the gaming press to notice roguelikes! The genre of classic roguelikes feels like it was designed to be a koan, a seemingly-impossible question that prompts thought, meditation and eventually enlightenment. Classic roguelikes (or as I’m coming to call them, true roguelikes) look entirely unlike everything magazines and websites told players they were supposed like. They rejected everything that being good meant. So why are they fun? Please contemplate that with me now. Ooommmm….

Coming back to Games Don’t Have To etc., it does push the boundaries of enjoyability a bit, but overcoming its purposeful vagueness turns out to be a puzzle to solve. And you can do it! Please give it a try. It might not be an all-time classic, but it’s an enjoyable use of five minutes. See if you agree.

Games Don’t Have To Be Good To Be Good, by sylvie (itch.io, web, $0)

Gamefinds: NANDgame

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

NANDgame is one of those puzzle games that’s really an educational game in disguise. By hooking up wires and relays, then logic gates, then larger pieces of basic computing hardware, you construct a basic processor from first principles, step by excruciating step.

This is actually a puzzle solution, which I don’t usually include as screenshots, but it’s small enough that it probably won’t be useful to you unless you stare and memorize it. So if you want to do it entirely on you own, don’t look hard at it!

Of course, the difference between a puzzle game and an educational game is only if the skill the puzzle requests you to learn has some objective use in our physical world. Tetris masters are robbed by the rest of the human race that their unique skill can’t be used to write software or design cars or something, for the kind of effort involved in getting good at all these things is exactly the same. This puzzle, at least, can get you on the road to designing low-level computing hardware, or at least started on that road.

Now that’s out of the way, I’m not completely happy with this introduction to computing architecture. It is true that you can start with NAND gates and, from them, derive all the other logic gates, and from there the rest of computing in its entirety, and this game has you do essentially that.

But NANDs are not the simplest gate to understand. Even their name comes from combining two other gates that you’re not introduced to first. And forcing the player to invent one out of relays, which you are actually required to do here, is a difficult first step. If you aren’t already well-versed in the kind of thinking this involves I’d suggest making use of the hints for each level, because the game gives you no other aid. It is a real trial by fire, and without prior exposure you’ll be staring at the relays for a while wondering not just what you’re supposed to do with them, but why.

But if you can power through them all, again using hints, it is really rewarding to know that, if you had the parts, you could construct a simple processor from first principles. It is difficult, but this is a good introduction. I’d treat it as kind of a test, and that the actual game is learning what you’re supposed to do to win by looking it up from other sources, including the help system. That’s to say, it’s all bosses, with the skills learned to defeat them coming from what amounts to GameFAQs.

NANDgame (web)

Gamefinds: Snekburd

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

One of the best puzzle games out there is Noumenon Games’ colorful, fun, and challenging Snakebird, its easier sequel Snakebird Primer, and their combined version on Switch Snakebird Complete.

But even Snakebird Complete costs $15. What if you just want to dip your toe in and find out why the snakebirds are the snakeword(s)?

Try Snekburd, on itch.io.

Created by a Pico-8 dev called Werxzy, they’ve made a “demake” of Snakebird that is essentially just the original but with different levels and pixel graphics, which can even be tried out on the web. And if you’re already a certified serpent-falconeer, it even has some new tricks for you to learn.

The first level. Even this one is challenging!

You control up to four colorful adorable snakebirds, who you can switch between freely. Their mission is to consume all of the fruit on each level, and then escape to the next island. They all move, one turn at a time, like the snake in Snake, but in a side-view, gravity-burdened world with unexpected implications.

It’s a good idea to spend some time at the start getting used to how the SBs operate. Despite being nominal birds they cannot fly. It’s easy to get a longer one trapped against a wall, but you’re allowed infinite undo levels, and you’ll need all of them.

An early level with multiple birds. Your first instinct may be to share the fruit, but sometimes the greed of one bird is necessary if they all are to escape.

A snakebird that eats a piece of fruit grows one space longer. In multibird levels it doesn’t matter to completion which feathery slitherer eachs which fruit, but sometimes the design of a level means a specific bird will ultimately need to be a certain length.

Some levels have no fruit, and reaching the exit is all you have to do. “All” you have to do.

To complete a level, not only must all the fruit be eaten, but all birds must make it to the goal portal. This will often be the hardest part of the puzzle. The ease with which one birdbrain can get stranded unless their snavian colleagues help them to the exit will confound you, but they should be applauded for not leaving anyone behind. (They can’t applaud themselves—no hands.)

Hey kids, it’s your favorite, Big [Snake] Bird, just arrived from Snesame Sneet!

There’s even a level editor for making puzzles to challenge your friends, or maybe even yourself if you’re really forgetful. Progress is saved between sessions on the same browser. And it’s a good thing, for the game lives up to the original’s reputation for difficulty.

So please, give these fluffy beakworms a place in your heart. I’m told that as parasites they’re completely benign!

Snekburd (from Werxzy on itch.io, $0, based on Noumenon Games’ Snakebird series)

Gamefinds: Conservation of Bass

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

There are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of quirky little games and things on itch.io. Lots of them are worthless, some are mere cash-ins, and a few are really nice, but good luck finding them with the towering piles of meh blocking view of the horizon, or indeed anything else.

So it’s nice when you find something through the browse feature that’s a joy to play, and such a game is Emlise’s Conservation of Bass. At first glance it looks like it’s going to be another game of the type that bitsy makes it easy to construct. Nothing against bitsy or its games, but most of them are pretty simple, leaning more into the fun of exploring a little world than offering challenging gameplay.

Here’s an early example level, that relies on the fact you can swap both horizontally and vertically.

But as it turns out Conservation of Bass only looks like it’ll be an exercise in pure exploration. It’s actually a completely linear platform-puzzler, and it requires a surprising amount of skill to get far into it. Your walking fish protagonist can only jump one space high, and can’t move very quickly, so sharp jukes in the air won’t save you. As is the custom for these kinds of puzzle games now there’s no penalty for failure, it immediately resets the puzzle for another try.

The fish’s special trick is, it can swap spaces with blocks exactly two spaces away from it with the X button, if they’re the same size as it. It can do this in all for cardinal directions, by pressing that arrow key. These are the same keys that move the fish, and allow it to jump, and it can even do this in mid-air. That’s where the control skill comes in, even if you have a solid plan for how to solve the puzzle, putting it into effect may take you a few tries, as the timing window for swapping a falling fish with a block over safe ground is pretty demanding.

This one is very tricky! The fish can only jump one space high, and it can only swap with blocks two spaces away. To get a block into a place where you can use it to get up to the glass of water goal, it has to come from the bottom layer of the starting platform, but that’s directly over the void. How to solve it….

Helping out is a special property of that X button that’s unveiled to you a short way in: holding it down freezes time, and lets you then use the arrow keys to decide which direction you want to swap in at a bit without needing split-second accuracy, so long as you pressed X with that same accuracy to begin with.

This is another of those games where you’re introduced to its elements slowly, which is great because the puzzles get hard fast. I got to the early levels of Chapter 3 before my pending deadline forced me to set it aside and write it up. See if you can get beyond that.

This is the last level I got to before posting.

Conservation of Bass (itch.io, $0, playable on the web with optional download)

Gamefinds: enclose.horse

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Less a game than a puzzle, and not so much runnable software than a website, enclose.horse is a very nice thing to spend a few minutes of your day, each day, on.

Every puzzle is a map of a field, with an arrangement of lakes and a horse somewhere in it. You have a number of square blocks to try to completely surround the horse. The horse does not like to be surrounded (click on them to get their opinion), so the more space you can enclose the horse within the higher your score.

When the horse is surrounded, a field of wheat springs up to show you how much space you’ve left the horse. Each space of wheat is one point. Some puzzles have cherries on the map, and also enclosing those is worth five bonus points. There’s also Golden Apples, they’re worth ten points. There’s bees too, trapping the horse with those is five points off your score. And there are pairs of portals, which count as an additional avenue of escape for Horsie that you must also account for.

This is not the perfect solution to today’s enclose.horse puzzle. Can you see how it could be improved?

The puzzles vary in difficulty. It’s usually easy to score at least something, but your true aim is for an optimal, perfect score. When you submit your score (you only get one try!) you’re told what the perfect score is and shown a solution that earns it. You can also browse past puzzles and see how well you do at those, create your own with a simple editor, and play other users’ puzzles.

The site continues to be worked on. Up until a couple of days ago there was a Check button, that you could use to find out what a puzzle’s perfect score was, so you could keep trying until you achieved it. However that introduced a bit of reluctance to submit anything that wasn’t perfection (it certainly made me a lot less likely to submit a score), so in the past couple of days it was removed, and that was probably for the best.

Give it a shot, while it’s harder than you’d think, it’s also not usually very hard. I think you’ll like it.

enclose.horse (web, $0)

A State Space Walkthrough of Two Early Stephen’s Sausage Roll Levels

We try not to shy away from hardcore geekery-peekery here, and I think this one qualifies for that nonsensical nomenclature.

We’ve brought up Stephen’s Sausage Roll (SSR) here in the past, it’s a uniquely challenging turn-based puzzle game. You move a little fork-wielding guy around to cook sausages in an infuriatingly precise way: each two-unit long sausage has two sides to each of its units, and each must be cooked exactly once per side. The controls are simple, but the puzzle start out tough and get tougher. New wrinkles get added in an organic way, and the game feels like it changes as you advance through it, even if you doesn’t actually gain any new verbs; the levels are just cleverly designed so that Stephen’s advanced tricks just aren’t possible before the game’s ready to unveil them.

In this 7½ minute video, a Youtube channel with the suitable name Stephen’s State Space examines two early levels of SSR with their move spaces graphed out, and shows that, while there is room for some slight variation, both of them require the player to progress through a specific sequence to finish the puzzle. If you don’t know anything about SSR, the shown-off solutions will seem to be brain-melting in their specificity. Let me assure you that these puzzles are only the beginning.

When people talk about why they play these kinds of hard puzzlers, they often express it in terms of how they make them feel when they solve it, the harder the puzzle, the greater the feeling of accomplishment. When I hear that, I think, duh, but more than that, why do people have a “feeling of accomplishment” when they play these games?

When you put it in terms of a feeling, I think you’re getting dangerously close to those people who put it all in terms of dopamine, which I hate. Game players aren’t dopamine addicts! If you could get it out of a syringe, would you do that?

You get a jolt of dopamine, experienced as a feeling of accomplishment, because you accomplished something! I have long thought that the best reason for playing difficult puzzles isn’t the feeling you get when you solve them, but their improving aspect. Working through tricky puzzles actually makes you a little smarter for doing them. The fact that they’re fun to do is the spoonful of sugar, to borrow Ms. Poppin’s phrase, to get you through.

So go forth and cook those sausages! If you can get all the way through SSR, I reckon that’s enough to get your INT score up to at least 15. I don’t know if I can say if it’ll affect your WIS, and it certainly won’t help your CHA, but let’s work on one D&D attribute score at a time, eh wot?

A Pair of Great Puzzle Games

This is a double review for Elephantasy 1 and Neyyah, played with a retail key and press key, respectively.

Gamefinds: Urjo

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

A second webgame in a row, Urjo is a logic puzzle game about choosing which of each space in a grid should be red or blue, with the following conditions:

1. Every row and column must contain the same number of red and blue spaces.

2. Every numbered space must have the same number of spaces touching it (in the eight spaces around it) as its color.

3. No two adjacent rows or columns can have the same sequence of colors. In practice this is the most subtle rule. It doesn’t always come into play, but if it does it’ll probably be the breakthrough you’ll need to pull off a solve.

The starting position of one of the more difficult puzzles.

Every puzzle has a unique solution. It is similar in style to another web puzzle called 0h h1, but a major difference in presentation is that Urjo is watching as you try to solve it, and won’t let you make incorrect moves. Instead, it counts up all your mistakes and scores you on how well you did. You have an overall rating that goes up as you both complete puzzles with fewer errors and faster times than other solvers. This can be annoying (it’s easy to click the wrong size of a circle on accident), and it pushes you to try to solve them faster than you may feel comfortable, which may also cause inadvertent mistakes.

The software will try to give you puzzles just past your skill level, and I can verify that they get very difficult. If you make mistakes it’ll offer to give you some pointers. Myself I ignore those tips; but I can see how some people might find them useful.

Urjo (web, free)

Gamefinds: words.zip

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

words.zip is a fun word search kind of game. It’s an infinite field of random letters. You try to find words snaking through the array. Words can twist and turn, and can also go backwards, but can’t go diagonally, cross themselves, or intersect with any other word that someone else has ever found.

Here I’ve found the word ROUGH in this relatively uncluttered area of the board. Apparently I’m the first person to ever find it! This is the fourth such word I’ve found since I started playing, and the shortest.

There is no scoring, but there is a newly-added list of challenges, various categories to try to find words in. If you decide to play, I think you should start out immediately dragging the field in one direction until you find an area almost devoid of other players’ words, and start from there. Of course as time passes it’ll get harder to find unique words. I read somewhere that there are plans to implement private games, with new fields to search through uncluttered by people entering ASS or POOT. If the well-hoed field is too much to tiptoe through, maybe come back in a week or two and see if that feature has gone live.

2,025 Item Categories Puzzle

Hah, a bit late with this one, mostly because I was trying to solve it. Found by John Overholt over on Mastodon, It’s a big page full of 2,025 different items that you’re to sort, into 45 categories of 45 items each. Because the year 2025 just ended, of course.

Click on an item, then click on another item of the same type. The two will merge together into one item. When you get an item with all 45 of its type it’ll be replaced with a box with the name of its category.

This is far from all the items! They scroll off to the right and down!

Remembering the locations of the growing categories quickly becomes a major part of the puzzle! When you combine an item with another one, the combined group ends up at the location of the second one you clicked. Use this information to get the categories as close to the upper-left as possible. This will prevent them from moving around too often, and aid your creaking grey matter in recording their places.

Unless I miss my guess, you’ll progress smoothly for a while; you’ll complete one or two specific categories long before any of the others; then at about six to ten categories finished you’ll collide rudely with the taxonomical wall. I had to use Google to get through the last 20% (that’s about 400 items remaining!), and I really think you will too, since everyone has holes in their knowledge.

Below (in ROT13, since it’s a spoiler), I list some of the harder categories to pick up on:

Gbz Unaxf zbivrf, Tbbtyr cebqhpgf, Gbyxvra punenpgref, “jrngure jbeqf,” pbyyrpgvir abhaf, HF ICf, xvaqf bs cnfgn (whfg ubj znal xvaqf NER gurer?!), “jrngure jbeqf,” Zneiry Pvarzngvp Havirefr punenpgref, pbzchgre ynathntrf, ynetr pbzcnavrf, ybtvpny snyynpvrf, purrfrf, shpxvat PBPXGNVYF (V qba’g qevax) naq, zbfg vashevngvat bs nyy vs lbh’er abg n ynjlre, yrtny qbpgevarf.