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.