the past week and a half (after finishing Haven) has been full of short games for me. surprisingly, mostly puzzle games. I'm anticipating a new PC soonish rather than way later (which is super exciting btw) so I've been laying off the longer games haha

instead, I'll give 3-4 lines on the 7 games I did finish in that time (all of which I went on to 100%, other than Bright Memory)

so here we go under the cut, in order from oldest to latest played:

In mid-November, I had planned for December to be the month that I really started to make the most of being laid off; get out to parks more, look into some more elaborate travel, make the most of my time. Then I stubbed my toe hard enough to break it and spent the month needing a six-step plan to make it to the other side of the apartment. So instead I put 60 hours into Clair Obscur and 50 into Ghost of Yotei, and we’ll see on that whole “initiative” thing in 2026.

Bioframe Outpost – I feel like Eufloria was one of those games that everyone heard of back in the early 2010s and then fell off the radar. The same team made this very odd metroidvania, somewhere between Zero Mission and Pokemon Snap. You only have the ability to scan your environment, and while this can stun creatures and robots for a while, it’s not very long at all. However, as you learn more about each creature and see it in various states like fighting, feeding, or falling prey to the infection ravaging the world, your stun gets more effective and you learn more ways to use environmental interactions to make progress. It’s a fascinating take on a metroidvania without combat, and I only wish that it was good. Movement is a hassle and map design makes several rookie mistakes. While I love the concept and wish more games had a scan visor in general, I didn’t make it more than an hour in.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 – When I played Dave the Diver, I was baffled as to how it won Indie GotY awards because it wasn’t indie by any reasonable definition and also sucked eggs. Clair Obscur I was at least aware how its oscarbait story made it an awards show darling but once again they had millions of dollars and (critically) a publisher. Semantics aside, the game is technically competent but utterly lacking in ambition. Characters are decently written and acted, but given stock personality traits and simple arcs. The art direction, even before the pallor of AI allegations, was let down on stock Unreal Engine lighting making it look like every other game. Mechanically you can take your pick of comparisons; Persona, Paper Mario, Final Fantasy XIII if you really want to get cute, with a dash of Sekiro parries to make investing in defense pointless. What really undermined the game for me was that not only was I playing it right after The Lonesome Guild, a much more earnest and well-constructed story about family, found family, and loss – I also happened to watch Haibane Renmei and Princess Tutu while playing the game. Without going too deep into spoilers, both shows touch on the major themes of Clair Obscur and absolutely throttle it in terms of art direction, storytelling, narrative, characters, music, writing; name a facet of the game other than parrying and it’s like throwing cinderblocks at a watermelon. You can even get to remarkably specific subthemes like “the duty of care an artist has towards their work” or “what does community mean when everyone dies young” and they’re still batting 1.000. I realize that ‘video game writing is bad’ isn’t a new or nuanced take but christ on a bicycle I’ve seen instant coffee commercials with more emotion and pathos than what Clair Obscur brings to the table.

A Game About Digging A Hole – Once again, if you put out a video game in 2025 and do not let the player remap the controls, you do not deserve human rights. It’s probably for the best I didn’t actually get into the game because it’s pretty mindless, but c’mon.

Possessor(s) – If this is the last game that Heart Machine ever puts out, it’s at least a kinder send-off than the unmitigated failure of Hyper Light Breaker. The devs were racing against the clock in the weeks after release, with most of the team having already been fired and the skeleton crew staring down the barrel of the same gun. With a few more weeks and a full team throughout, this truly could’ve been something special. The heart is there. I can forgive the now extremely stale ‘suburban magic’ aesthetic that’s been played out in everything from Dreamscaper to Young Souls to Dungeons of Hinterburg. I can forgive the map having a strange layout with frequent tunnels and switchbacks that only serve to fill out space. I can forgive the scars in level design and collectable placement from a missing double-jump ability that was clearly removed late in development. I can forgive story triggers seeming to pop in out of order and making a plot overly reliant on reveals shaky and ill-timed. I can forgive it all because this is clearly something that someone loved, and yet weren’t given the ability to see it through. That being said, a human and a monster entering into a soul pact because both of them are dying was a lot sexier when Drakenguard did it.

Pampas & Selene: The Maze of Demons – The UnEpic devs are one of those teams where despite not really liking most of their games I keep trying them. This game is a love letter to Maze of Galious, which is one of those games I’ve now played four or five of its spiritual successors (shoutouts to Astalon) but I know little about directly. Dungeoneering is functional, abilities are decently spaced, I have some gripes with structure and game design but many of those failures I expect are deliberate homage to an older style. Overall I found it to be a perfectly competent metroidvania, though between this and Portrait of Ruin I’m definitely over the character-swap gimmick.

Tametsi – I guess I’m the sort of freak that does weird minesweeper puzzles now. I have some minor gripes with the UI and controls that amount to essentially personal taste, overall this is the sort of game someone can look at the store page and know if they’re down to party. I’ve having a whale of a time.

Primal Planet – It’s never a good sign for a metroidvania when I start getting an urge to play one while I’m already in the middle of one. Primal Planet is a very strange game structurally, with a heavy reliance on XP for progression but very little gating on how that XP is spent or how the player moves through the environment. The result is that the difficulty curve is fairly flat and the areas have very little to differentiate them. The AI dino companion is also very stupid and frail, and there aren’t enough skill points around to invest in your HP, your damage, the dino’s HP, the dino’s damage, improving the village, and various utility skills. There’s some very interesting pieces here but they don’t really cohere in a compelling way.

To preface this, I think all the games in the image are well-designed and fun, and they're some of my favorite puzzle games.

Puzzle games are incredibly varied as a genre, but I think they mostly fall somewhere along the spectrum of applying rules to knowing things.

Games like Tametsi (basically minesweeper but with extra rules and handcrafted levels) are entirely about applying known rules over and over until you arrive at the one and only solution. The challenge of the puzzles is in noticing that rules can be applied, and being able to iterate deeply enough to draw conclusions (i.e. realizing that if one square is a mine, it forces another to not be, which would force another to be a mine, which would exceed a given number, so the first square couldn't be a mine.) The entire game is self contained, and doesn't rely on any outside knowledge beyond a basic grasp of numbers.

spacechem, ABI-DOS, and games of that type (most Zachtronics stuff) are a step removed from simple rule application, they offer a limited sandbox and tools, but you know what each tool does. The puzzle is in applying the right tools to inputs to arrive at the desired output. You have to come up with novel applications of the rules, but you don't have to puzzle out what the rules are.

A step further down the spectrum is where we find The Witness and Antichamber. Games like these often don't explain the rules, or only partially do so, and sink or swim on their ability to lead the player to understanding without being overly handholdy or requiring too large a leap in understanding to go from unsolved puzzle to solved puzzle. These games are theoretically self contained, but sometimes require the player to simply 'get' a mechanic, which can be frustrating (I think Understand is a good example of a game that goes too far in the 'just get it' direction.)

Lingo is probably where the spectrum personally ends for me in what I'd consider to still be a "puzzle game" and is also the most reliant of these examples on outside the game knowledge. It has puzzles in a similar format to The Witness, except it operates on word association. Given a prompting word and a series of blanks, apply the appropriate rules to come up with an answering word. This sort of game has a type of difficulty unlike it's predecessors on this list, it is reliant on out-of-game knowledge that you might simply not have, and there is nothing in game you can do to get it. If your vocabulary doesn't have the answer in it, it's entirely likely that you won't be able to guess or apply rules to come up with the answer, no matter how well made the in-game clues are.

I think overall Lingo does an incredible job with it's puzzle design and environmental clue giving to help you learn the rules, but generally, games of this type are incredibly hard to design well and design accessibly, and they can feel deeply unfair when you understand the rules, and you see what the puzzle is asking for, but you simply don't have the knowledge to produce an answer.

I see them in my sleep. Patterns, Mines, One-Two-Ones, Two out of Threes, Lines connecting squares indicating that YES, there is a EXACTLY one across all these fields. The patterns have texture, sometimes they are so familiar that even the logical connections of connections have become routine. Today I found a series of wild jumps in a corner and the whole mess of entanglements fell down into a singular, solid state of free and taken space.

Tametsi is a minesweeper game of 100 Puzzles and 60 bonus puzzles. It came out in 2017, and costs 2.35€ on Steam. Its also one of the greatest games I have ever played. I am not kidding.

The puzzles of Tametsi are basicaly just Minesweeper. Find the mines, mark them with a right click, find the safe spots and left click to reveal more numbers. The numbers say how many mines are next to them. There are a few different variations of shapes the board can be made out of, although mostly its just squares or hexagons. Oh and one more thing - these levels are all made by hand, crafted up to the smallest details

---by a mad architect who is forcing me to look at all possible futures all at once.---

There is never a point in Tametsi where you have to guess. Let me say that again - THERE IS ALWAYS EXACTLY ENOUGH INFORMATION YOU CAN SEE TO FIND OUT WHERE THE NEXT MINE IS AND IS NOT. no matter how obscure that information may be.

Tametsi teached me tricks. The most basic one I quickly had to put to constant use - marking tiles as connected by having an exact number of mines. If the mine is on the right, it can't be on the left, and vice verca.

---Each possibility nessecitates others to be false, in order to be true. For now, the cat is both dead and alive---

In order to compress information, Tametsi boasts an innovative feature: Painting Mode! Using a wide variety of colors and brush sizes you can make your screen look like you are trying to solve the great murder of 1978! My most simple tool is a simple connecting line ---one mine--- and if im fancy the double line ===two mines=== And soon after, I can start to combine the lines! A shorter line that exactly matches a longer one means all those extra tiles can't be mines! A single three long right next to a double three long means one mine here, and no mine there.

____ When one line meets a number in part, there can be only a maximum of one mine there, but also maybe none at all____ Max 1

But Max 1 on a 3 means Min2 on the rest of the spaces and oh look there is another 3 right next to it andthenmin1thereandthatgivesmemax1herebecauseofthe2ANDOHMYGODTHERENEEDSTOBEATLEAST1HERETHATMEANS

Min1 & Max1 => line Line & 2 => line Line & 3 => double Double & 3 => line

Uhh this line is shorter now!

What the fuck am I doing here?

Recently I have been obsessed with LOGIC. In first-order LOGIC there are TWO STATES a preposition can be in: MINE and NOT A MINE. These prepositions are interlinked/interlinked through logical connecters such as AND, OR, EXISTS, FOR ALL, TWO, THREE, LINE, DOUBLE LINE, MIN, MAX, FIFTEEN GREENS, FOUR IN COLUMN SIX

---Consider all possibilities to be in a possibility space---If either A or B or C have to be true and they all share that THERE IS A MINE ON THE OTHER FUCKING SIDE OF THE PUZZLE YOU ASSHOLE GENIUS TORTURE DEMON I HAVE SAT HERE FOR 20 MINUTES NOT ONE MINE TO MY NAME---Then all possibilities where there is no mine there can be discarded. The cat is dead.