Welcome to Puzzle Lovers! - Play Hard. Think Harder.

Welcome once again to our weekly newsletter with puzzle game news, new and upcoming releases, giveaways, deals and bundles, spotlight on a lesser-known or forgotten game, and other stuff.

Greetings to those who’ve joined since last week! If you found us through a link to the newsletter, read the group overview to see what else we can offer, visit the forum for puzzle discussion, follow our curator for reviews and recommendations, check out our Basic Functionality and Accessibility Guide on how to improve your games, and tell your friends if you like what you see. Thanks!

Ideally, every group member would follow our curator and vice versa, but until then, here's the changelog. And don't forget our many lists based on themes and subgenres.

• Locked Together (horror)
  
• Markov Alg (programming)
  
• Mind Diver (adventure)
  
• Sisyphus Is a Bug (platformer)

• Dotu (logic)
  
• Home for Friends: Loving Paws CE (hidden object)
  
• Minesweeper Big Bomb (logic)

The giveaways are on SteamGifts, but no need to create an account, just visit the site and log in through Steam. Good luck!

If you have your own puzzler, adventure, demo, or some new content coming out on mobile or PC? Let us know in the forum or by adding sdumitriu on Steam Chat.

• Chronigma (logic, time travel)
  
• FOGGY Golf (casual, golf, daily)
  
• Green Wave (casual, strategy)
  
• Million Card Game (card game)
  
• MindEscape (escape room)
  
• Piczle World of Puzzles (casual)
  
• The Shadow of Shadows (adventure, casual)
  
• Tichupro by Spectrum (card game)

• ChessExtra (board game)
  
• Dude Called Barry (platformer)
  
• Interballistic Symphony (indie)

• 👍 Cubuleto (pathfinding, stepping, sokoban): Find your way through puzzling worlds made out of cubes. Classic stepping game, with buttons and portals and fragile floors, but also enemies that like to charge towards you when you step in their sightline. Getting enemies to the right place seems to be the focus of most levels. Decent, though the constantly moving terrain is a bit distracting. (my partial playthrough )
  
• 👍 Momento (cozy, logic, point&click): A cozy house decoration game, but a lot more puzzly than the rest. You have to tidy up a room through different stages of a person’s life. Put away toys, pack their school bag, arrange books on a shelf… And while you’re free to do that however you want, there are plenty of achievements for doing special actions, like stacking all the number blocks on top of each other, and for stacking them in the correct order, or for finding and reading all the postcards, or for putting all the sandtoys in the bucket. There are also a few gifts you can choose to influence their life, like do they get a toy dinosaur, which will lead them to a science phase, or a doll, which will lead to an artistic life? Make different choices to discover different rooms, each with its own follow-up choices, for a lot of replay value. Nice and cozy, but also thinky, like putting a bunch of A Little to the Left levels into a point&click game in which choices matter. (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Monocular Odyssey (sokoban, perspective illusions): A sokoban game, but the terrain is affected by perspective illusions: depending on the level orientation, tiles may or may not be neighbors. Great so far, starts a bit too easy, but it’s got good, challenging levels too. (my partial playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Network Notation (logic, strategy, resource management): Hack into a network in a thinky race against enemy defences. Each level is a graph of nodes connected by edges, with you starting in one of the nodes, and a few target nodes you must conquer. You expand node by node across connections, with each action taking some time and resources. You have a starting number of “workers”, your power, with each worker being able to maintain a conquered node, attack a new node, or defend an attacked node. There may be defense agents as well, trying to attack you once they are alerted to your intrusion, so you have to plan your strategy for each level well: do you attack quickly before the enemy reaches you, do you conquer the enemies first, do you go for compute nodes that will give you more workers, do you trigger the alarm early for a chance to win before the enemy gets to you or silently creep towards the goal on a slower route? You also get points for speed and number of conquered nodes, so you may try different strategies to maximize your score. And with these points, you buy upgrades, like faster hacking speed, or more starting power, or delayed intrusion detection. You can re-assign points before each level, so part of the strategy is also figuring out if a level benefits from different upgrades. Good, I like it. (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Right Click To Activate Translator (language deciphering, deduction, point&click adventure): After being transported to an alien planet, you must figure out the strange language you see all around you. Good game, much like Chants of Sennaar, though at least what's in the demo is a bit too obvious/explicit. (my playthrough)
  
• 😞 Shroud of Gloom (point&click escape room, scary, hidden object): Escape room in reverse, break into a mansion and figure out what happened to its inhabitants. A unique presentation, white on black like chalk on a blackboard, made even darker by the absence of light. More about finding and clicking on the right things and less about logic puzzles. (my playthrough)

• Carrotour (stepping): Play as a rabbit that likes carrots a bit too much, so he got transformed into a horse. Navigate a dungeon in which you can only move like a chess knight (L pattern), collecting carrots and avoiding enemies. Portals, buttons, and the gates that control enemies, with nice mechanics that make this challenging and interesting. There are also a few chaotic, fast paced boss fights that rely more on reflexes than logic.
  
• Dotu (logic, math): Place dots in a grid so the total number of dots in a row or column matches the target. A bit like nonograms, except that instead of counting only 1 for each filled-in cell, you can fill it with more than one dot. Except that you’re not free to use as many dots as you want, some levels only give you specific dot tiles, like only using 2 dots or 3 dots, some levels only give you a fixed amount of each tile, and more such variants. Unfortunately, the majority of the levels are not very interesting; they have a lot of possible solutions, and you can solve them mostly by vibes, just put down dots, and it will eventually be solved. In later levels, when this vibe “strategy” stops working, the lack of helpful tools makes it unpleasant, as there’s no pencil marks, no drawing, and you must solve it “in pen”.
  
• The Last Case of John Morley (detective, adventure): An interactive detective story, good production value, but more interactive fiction than actual deductions. Read a lot of notes, look at a lot of things, and so the game plays itself for a few hours until it’s finished.
  
• Mini Eulerian Graph (one-line): A simple one-line game, draw a single line covering every tile in a grid.
  
• OFF BY (math): Use the given blocks with numbers, operations, and alterations to make an almost correct equation. Each level has an “off by” number, so for example, if the target is off by 2, you could say that 3+1=2 or 3+1=6 as the solution.
  
• Solid Void Art Nonograms (nonogram, jigsaw): Solve nonograms, then on top of the grid solve a jigsaw-like block puzzle. I didn't play it, but it seems needlessly 3D.
  
• taat (action sokoban): This is mostly about timing. After a few levels that introduce boxes and buttons and portals and chickens, most levels are a bit (or a lot) chaotic. Instead of modern, well-designed, thoughtful levels that feel like an old-style puzzle-action game, with hidden buttons, timing, portal mazes, waiting, fast moves… It’s not a well-made “thinky” game, but it may appeal to children and those who prefer action instead of difficult puzzles.

Highlighting a short and free puzzle game every week!

Highlighting another free puzzle game every week!

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• Feedback is important, so let us know what you like or don't like.
  
• Follow our curator and get notified about new additions and reviews.
  
• Tell your puzzle- and/or adventure-loving friends and your favorite developers about us and our Basic Functionality and Accessibility Guide.