Her Trees: Puzzle Dream is an abstract point-and-click puzzle game with a goth girl aesthetic

Rachel Watts, 20 January 2026

Oh, how I love a strange pocket-sized puzzle game. Bonus points if it has a striking art style. Her Trees: Puzzle Dream is exactly that. An abstract point-and-click puzzle game with a goth girl aesthetic and a faint vibe that this game may or may not be haunted (complimentary). “Unravel the strange puzzles hidden in your dreams,” reads the Steam page, and I couldn’t download the demo fast enough. 

Spoiler warning: If you're going to check out the Steam page to download the demo or wishlist the game, I wouldn’t recommend scrolling too far down the page as there’s a gif that spoils one of the puzzles (the best one in the demo, imo).

After piecing together a wooden door and letting yourself inside, Her Trees: Puzzle Dream invites you to click around a scene filled with many objects, and sometimes, when you click on an object, you’ll be given a puzzle. It’s the same structure as the developer’s previous game, Her Trees: Puzzle House, and this new game feels very much like an extension of the first game's delicate black-and-white universe. 

Each puzzle tasks you with searching for a sequence of alphabetical letters. There might be a jumble of words on a page, but use a bookmark and you’ll find that some are highlighted. Type that sequence into the grid next to you, and you’ll solve the puzzle.

I really love this type of visual puzzle-solving. It’s not your classic logic brain teaser by any standard, but it does challenge you with changing your perspective and making deductions about where things should go. You're always trying to figure out how to make things fit. I really like puzzles where I can move things around and feel my way through them, and Puzzle Dream does exactly that.

Another aspect I love is that the words you find don’t even spell anything. If they did, it would be more of a word search. Instead, finding each letter feels more intuitive, like you’re fiddling with a physical puzzle.

At first, the challenge is to work out how to find the letters. Whether it’s seeing which branches of a tree curl around certain letters, or lining up flower petals in a certain way. You’re often not sure how something fits, but as you move things around in a scene, it will come into focus. I guess in that way, there’s not a lot of ‘puzzle solving’ here, but you still need to deduce how to use each object. In that way, Her Trees: Puzzle Dream is more like a magic eye poster. Shift your perspective, and it will come into focus, and there’s satisfaction in that.

It’s a delicate puzzle game in that way. After frying my brain on the likes of the exceptionally good Spooky Express and MotionRec, it’s nice to play something which requires a more delicate approach. It’s quiet, reflective, and abstract. Click around, and objects will make little noises -the clinking of empty jars, the rustling of leaves - it’s like I could smash and snap them if I applied too much force. It evokes the feeling that I have a delicate touch, and this is echoed in the puzzles too. When you pick a letter, it makes a subtle noise like a drop in an ocean. Each time you finish a puzzle, a flower bud will sprout on a tree. I have no idea what this means, but I don't really mind.

I’m really interested in what’s happening in the image below, a puzzle that wasn’t in the demo, but I’m desperate to have a crack at it. 

Her Trees: Puzzle Dream reminds me of the work of Madison Karrh (I highly recommend her game Birth), or Miniatures by Other Tales Interactive - a quietly artistic game that uses puzzles to evoke a feeling more than test your brain. Their priority is using puzzles to communicate a certain vibe, instead of testing your logic skills. In a genre that can often get caught up in systems and rules, I really appreciate this more intuitive and abstract approach to puzzle design.