#zachtronics

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.

this is "pistons my goats" and it makes use of (or more accurately, abuses) the extending piston arms. i like how the delicate dance of the arms manages to get everything in the right spot without crashing into itself looks. it's not a very good solution in any other metric though. it's very expensive, large, and rather slow!

this one is lovingly entitled "fuck this thread" because it took a week to complete. it's not at all a good solution, but it works, and that's all that mattered to me at the time. the joy i felt after kicking this puzzle into a ditch was hard to describe.

this is the "leadpoisonator 2" and it is an optimization of a previous solution to the puzzle. it's somewhat fast, though a little expensive. i really like how the arms move everything at the same time, it sort of looks like a conveyor belt.

i named this one "I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT" due to the horrific movement the right arm does to rotate the molecule 180 degrees, the annoying movement the left arm does to bond the final light blue air and salt atoms to the central tin atom, and the track movement the bottom right arm has to do to dodge the full molecule as it gets rotated into position. this was a hard puzzle to solve, so i probably won't try and optimize it.

this is the "taker aparter 2" and it. well. takes the thing apart. it's not an optimization, the "2" in the name comes from the fact that earlier in my playthough i made a similar machine for a separate puzzle called "taker aparter." i'm fond and hateful of the journey the final lead atom takes to reach its destination. the handoffs between the arms remind me of baton relays.