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Alan Hazelden's Thinky Third Thursday — February 2025

Alan Hazelden, 20 February 2025
We’re delighted to bring you the latest edition of Alan Hazelden’s Thinky Third Thursday newsletter. Alan is the founder of studio and publisher Draknek & Friends and designer of renowned puzzle games like A Monster’s Expedition, Cosmic Express, and A Good Snowman is Hard to Build.

With Steam Next Fest coming up next week, this edition is entirely focused on upcoming games with demos!

New game from Draknek & Friends: The Electrifying Incident!

Earlier this week we announced our new game, The Electrifying Incident: A Monster Mini-Expedition.

This is set to launch this April, and in keeping with the theme of this edition, you can play the demo right now on Steam. The Electrifying Incident is a short adventure featuring a familiar monster exploring a mysterious facility and manipulating the electrical hazards and locked doors to find a way to the source of the problem.

If you enjoy playing the demo, please give us a wishlist, and share the news with your friends too!

If you want to hear more about the development of The Electrifying Incident, today's episode of the Draknek & Friends Official Podcast features an interview with programmer Benjamin Davis. The episode touches on all the games Ben has worked on with Draknek & Friends, including A Monster's Expedition, Cosmic Express, and A Good Snowman is Hard to Build.

We release a new podcast episode every Thursday, speaking to developers of some of our favourite puzzle games and shedding light onto how games get made and the people behind them. Other recent interviews include talking to the developers of The Case of the Golden Idol, Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure, and Leaf's Odyssey!

And one last piece of Electrifying Incident news: our merch store has just been updated with items from the new game!

Upcoming games with new demos

Thanks to studio manager Mairi for playing and writing up these upcoming games while I was ill this week!

Is This Seat Taken?, by Poti Poti Studio and Wholesome Games Presents
From Poti Poti Studio comes a light-hearted logic puzzle about putting everyone in their place. Literally. The demo features six levels - five regular levels and one trickier "special level". The puzzles are immensely fun to solve, but what I find most charming is it's halftone art style and the satisfying "pop" as you drop a character in place.

Kiko's Apple Adventure, by PawPaw Games
Kiko’s Apple Adventure is a sokoban game about pushing rafts, collecting apples, and outsmarting sharks. The demo features some clever and colourful levels which tease a little of what you can expect from the full game. Notably, the team behind Kiko's Apple Adventure are one of the recipients of the Draknek New Voices Puzzle Grant, and we're excited to follow this game closely.

YOUR HOUSE, by PATRONES & ESCONDITES
From the brief demo, YOUR HOUSE appears to be what happens when you cross a text-based adventure with an escape room. As you sift through papers and postcards, you click words in the text to interact with the environment. The puzzles come when inactive words must have their conditions met. After all, how can you click the word "cut" if you don't have a sharp implement in your hand. The demo showcases it's creativity quickly and focuses a little more on its narrative than puzzles, which just serves to leave me even more excited for the full game when it releases this March.

Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping, by Happy Broccoli Games
Fans of a certain Eugene McQuacklin will be very excited to hear that Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping has also released a demo this week. The demo is a fairly substantial 30 minutes long, and in it we meet the detective's new partner in (solving) crime, Freddy Frederson as they embark on a glamping adventure together. The puzzles in it largely represent the opening act, so whilst they aren't especially challenging, they leave just enough bread crumbs of intrigue to be excited for the full release.

ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard, by Pixel Maniacs and PM Studios, Inc.
The ChromaGun 2 demo begins like a regular series of test chambers with all the tongue-in-cheek humour of corporate satire I love in this genre. In terms of puzzles it's straightforward: use the ChromaGun to colour surfaces and unlock doors. But what the demo does really well is nudge the player to quickly go "off test track". Gone are the flat white panels and quickly you're exploring a deliberately glitchy, dystopian world of melting colours. It's the kind of demo that rewards looking for secrets, and with level design like this, ChromaGun 2 has plenty of them.

Schrodinger's Cat Burglar, by Abandoned Sheep
Another demo you can play now is Schrodinger's Cat Burglar. Delightfully, it features both a single player, and a co-op mode allowing for even more puzzling fun. Theoretically, that is. Besides solving quantum puzzles where your character exists in different states as "observed" and "unobserved", Schrodinger's Cat Burglar is most fun in how it lets you get up to a whole host of feline shenanigans like knocking things off ledges and riding a roomba-like robot.

Thinky releases from the past month

Free games:

Paid games:

New demos:

That's it!

Did you particularly enjoy any of the games above, or do you have a recommendation for a game I should check out? Please get in touch!

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Disclaimer: Thinky Games is part of the Carina Initiatives and may have professional relationships with individuals and businesses related to the subject of this article. Please see our Editorial Policy for details.

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