Blog titles are for squares. And maybe hexagons.

It's been five years since I first tried the demo for TOEM, nearly two years since I played the full game, and a year and a half since the surprise announcement of TOEM 2. I've been waiting for this one. All the charms of the first game, a variety of things to do and sights to photograph, plus a few new tools and toys and quality-of-life upgrades. That's all I needed, and that's what I got.

Very few puzzle games have sold me on their core gimmick as fast and hard as Baba Is You did, but plenty of games have at least gotten somewhat close. Take Mimic Meadows, a sokoban-esque puzzler about shapeshifting into different critters by copying their patterns. The demo does a decent job of showing off the concept, and how it could be iterated on in strange ways in later stages. On the topic of sokoban variants, Moonlit Dreams is a minimalist puzzler that ramps up in complexity pretty quickly, and Outpour adds a fun twist to the formula with its water mechanic.

Lately I've taken an interest in detective and deduction puzzles (in the vein of, say, Obra Dinn, Golden Idol, or Duck Detective). Or perhaps rediscovered an old interest? I used to love those old logic puzzle books when I was a kid. Ambroise Niflette & the Gleaned Bell immediately stands out for its childlike aesthetic, with all of its characters stylized as plush dolls and wind-up toys and wooden figurines. The gameplay loop of intel-gathering and interrogation and deduction works well, and its core mystery has enough intrigue to keep me interested. Death at Fleming Manor seems like a more straightforward Golden Idol-like, maybe not quite as intuitive in its UI but still offering some good opportunities for puzzle-solving. Funeral for the Sun was the one that most iterates on its concept, with an Obra Dinn-esque loop of peering into flashback scenes and deducing not just names, but connections between different characters at different points in time, spanning years and entire generations. The most interesting of the lot, even if this early demo still had some kinks to work out.

A couple other games were in the same ballpark, but their demos leaned in opposite directions. Beware of the Cartographer! focused more on its puzzle (charting landmarks on a map) and only hinted at its larger narrative (mapping the border between two rival kingdoms and getting caught up in all manner of mischief in the process), but still had enough to leave me wanting more of both. PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE focused more on its narrative (a small-town mystery that delves into some heavier subject matter) and showed a little bit of its puzzle aspect (communicating by echoing other people's words back at them) that I'm interested to see how the game makes use of.

Desktop Explorer wraps its central mystery in a '90s computer interface. Plenty of games use this particular flavor of retro (like Factory 95, or the deckbuilder Hack 95) and trying to map old navigation onto new genres can occasionally feel a little clunky, but for games where the navigation is itself part of the gameplay loop (like this one, or Hypnospace Outlaw) it sticks the landing much better. Anything and everything is a potential puzzle, a potential story thread, or both, which opens up a lot of fascinating angles.

For a change of pace, I wanted at least one action game on the list. ZWAARD is a top-down hack-and-slash, reminiscent of Hyper Light Drifter in its aesthetic and gameplay loop, with an added layer of complexity in the form of inventory and weapon management. That last part may be a bit of a sticking point (when I try to describe this game's systems, the word crunchy comes to mind), but it feels pretty satisfying when it does land and opens up a variety of gameplay styles (like the one I tried out in the demo, swapping out the basic sword blade for a heavy cleaver). The visual effects are pretty overwhelming, but thankfully that can be reduced in the settings. Overall, something to keep an eye on.

Poly Bricks, a freeform Lego-esque model builder from the developer of Poly Bridge. I like the concept, but at times it felt a little finicky to control and get all the pieces placed just right, and it might get a little tedious to build a large model with hundreds of pieces. Maybe it's just not for me. I'll stick with physical Lego sets for now.

Factory 95, an automation puzzle game about "building" Powerpoint slides. Fun concept, nails the aesthetic, and has some interesting restrictions to work around as the puzzles get more and more complex. Having played similar programming games, my only concerns so far are that the UI has room for improvement (a few more keyboard shortcuts would work wonders) and the later puzzles might get more repetitive rather than more engaging. I'm willing to see how it plays out, though.

More puzzle games I liked: Colorbound is a charming little puzzle-platformer that gets decent mileage out of its core gimmick. Trifoil and Bento Blocks both satisfy that "seek patterns on a grid" part of my brain quite nicely (drawing lines and arranging blocks, respectively). Cloudscrapers too, but from a different angle: a simple strategy game about building a tall tower with ever-cycling patterns and objectives to let you build higher; of the games I sampled this time around, this was one of the highlights.

My favorite of the lot, though, was ShantyTown. It's a builder game à la Cloud Gardens or ISLANDERS, but with an emphasis on stacking buildings together and creating improvised, colorful, densely packed urban spaces. It's a very striking aesthetic that I've always had a fondness for, and this hits a good balance between building spaces that are functional and visually appealing. Definitely looking forward to the full game.

I'm also looking forward to The Wide Open Sky is Running out of Catfish, an eclectic photography game. "What if sea creatures but flying" is another aesthetic I always admire (see also, Sky: Children of the Light), and this game blends it into a rather unique setting: casual witchcraft, old computers and online chatrooms, and giant talking catfish, to name a few. Toss in a low-res visual style, a chill gameplay loop, and a surprisingly bittersweet narrative, and you've got a recipe for something memorable.

I could say the same for Burden Street Station, with maybe a few caveats. As far as abstract point-and-click narratives go, the art is good and setting and characters are compelling. Gameplay-wise I'm still on the fence; I like the core mechanic in concept (accumulating different personas with different dialogue options), but in practice it feels underutilized and doesn't give you much room to experiment. It's got a lot of potential, though, and I hope the full game can live up to it.

Feline Forensics and the Meowseum Mystery seems alright, but the demo was very short and had a pretty basic puzzle, so I don't think I got enough of it to pass judgement. My one complaint was, once again, the interface: controller only or keyboard only, in a game that feels like it was made for a mouse pointer.

One of the few games that left me with more complaints than compliments was Akatori. It has the bones of a competent 2D 'vania and a good mix of pixel art visuals, but the gameplay just didn't land. The movement and combat both felt kinda floaty and inconsistent. A couple of interesting ideas, but it doesn't come together.

Monument Valley

Another year, another assortment of puzzle games, narrative games, and general miscellany. Games I could chip away at a few levels at a time when I had a spare moment, or games I could run through in a session or two but linger in my mind long after. Somewhere in the overlap between all those categories was Monument Valley (the first two games, and the third whenever I get around to it), one of those perfect little experiences that seems tailor-made for my tastes in particular: neat puzzles about navigating vibrant Escher landscapes. Still holds up today, over a decade since the first game was released.

(Honorable mentions, puzzle: River Towns, LOK Digital, Strange Jigsaws, CIPHER ZERO, Leap Year, Proverbs) (Honorable mentions, narrative: Frogsong, Welcome to Elk) (Honorable mentions, miscellaneous: A Solitaire Mystery, ENA: Dream BBQ, Elephantasy: Flipside)

LUMINES Remastered

"Puzzle game" sure does encompass a lot of subgenres, huh. As far as arcade puzzlers go, there are a lot of different ways to do falling blocks, and Lumines has always sort of felt like its own little corner (but not an isolated corner, given the likes of Tetris Effect and Lumines Arise). Having now played it, I can say it's well earned: simple mechanics with a lot of depth and challenge, wrapped in excellent sound and visuals. And the truest sign of a good falling blocks puzzle, the patterns lodge themselves in my head and I keep thinking about ways to fit them together long after I stop playing. Squares upon squares upon squares.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

My sister got me this one as a gift, and we had a good time with it. It's a fun twist on the old-school Zelda format; still has the exploration and dungeon crawling, but with a completely different and much larger set of tools. It's fun to play around and find different useful summons for different scenarios.

Or just, like, set everything on fire. That works too.

ABI-DOS / Last Call BBS

I went back to the well of programming games this year: I picked up the other half of the Zachtronics collection, and played through TIS-100, SHENZHEN I/O, and Last Call BBS (I'll get to EXAPUNKS sooner or later, and now Kaizen as well). As far as programming games go, the closer they become to being Actually Just Code the more they need to do to keep my interest, but TIS and SHENZHEN have some a good variety of constraints and challenges to work around. Last Call BBS goes in a different direction, being a collection of smaller games that opt for breadth over depth — a bit of programming, a bit of solitaire, some puzzles, even a nifty little model kit builder. All three titles present themselves as period pieces about tech culture ('80s, near future, and '90s respectively), tying them all together nicely. Looking forward to what Coincidence puts out in the future.

That's not to say they're the only ones out there, though. Earlier in the year I also tried out ABI-DOS, which quickly climbed up the ranks of my favorite Zachlikes. It hit all the right notes, with a mechanical complexity that keeps building upon itself and an extra layer of optimization challenges. The best kind of programming challenge, one that makes you spend hours puzzling out a single level, but also makes you want to come back and keep doing that over and over.

Trailmakers

I've seen a few people play this game over the years, and it always seemed like a fun time. One Steam sale later, and hey wait where did the last three weeks go. It's a fun vehicle builder and physics sandbox, though some parts were more intuitive than others (I could build decently functional cars and boats and submarines, but never really did figure out airplanes…) I played through both campaigns in the base game to completion, though it feels like I only really scratched the surface: there's still co-op, DLC, and generally tinkering around in the sandbox to build more efficient machines and/or overengineered contraptions. Things to revisit in the future.

The Wandering Village

…Though with all the games coming out, I'm always playing catch-up. I got a backer key for this one when it launched in early access, but I've had enough on my backlog that I could wait patiently for this one to reach 1.0. Worth the wait, I think. A nice city builder with an interesting premise and aesthetic, and a campaign that's just about right, not too short but not too challenging.

Onbu is a friend.

Root

Going into 2025, I decided I would force myself to socialize a little more. Progress has been… slow but steady. I found a local group that runs a weekly board game night and have been making an effort to attend (semi-)regularly, and it's been one of the few bright spots for me in an otherwise grey year. I don't have the social battery for it often, but when I do it's a good time, and a good excuse to try out a game I've never played before.

Root is on the list both as a representative of all the board games I tried this year, and because it's a fascinating game in its own right. I had a chance to play the tabletop version a couple times (but only a couple times, hard to organize a group for it unfortunately) and quickly developed an interest both aesthetically and mechanically; eventually I picked up the digital version so I could understand it more on my own time. There's some neat things going on here, and it's sparked some inspiration for my own work that I'd like to carry forward into the coming year.

(Runner-up: Betrayal at House on the Hill)

Peggle

This has been a weird year for picking up old hobbies. I found a reason to start playing board games again. Card games too; I've been playing Eternal more often. I recovered my old Neopets account and have been following through on some old goals I left unfinished. And somewhere between those I replayed Peggle Deluxe (and Peggle Nights), which I hadn't touched since before I even had a Steam account. For one reason or another (overlapping reasons, sometimes) I was drawn back to all of them this year. Nostalgia is funny like that.

Nuclear Throne

For all the games I played back in the day, there are just as many I could've played but never got around to. I reached deep into the backlog for this one; picked it up in a bundle ages ago but never played it, and the recent anniversary update was as good an excuse as any. It's fun, but it's probably the most challenging game I picked out this year. Even winning a single run was an ordeal. I mostly don't regret it, though, and I'll have to keep trawling my backlog for more in the coming year. Some of these games have waited long enough.

NAIAD

One more I've been wanting to play for a while. It's… something special. Slow, meandering, and beautiful. A lovely little ecosystem to explore and see how all the little pieces of flora and fauna interact, and collect little fragments of music and poetry. Every chapter I want to look at it and listen to it just as much as I want to play it. File NAIAD right next to TOEM under "games that make me a little happier when I think about them".

I like to start or end the year with something nice. I think this will do just fine.