Our thinky highlights of 2022

Whew, what a year for thinky games! Not only have we had so many great games to play, but all sorts of amazing things have happened in the community — the launch of the very site you’re reading, both the Thinky Puzzle Game Jam and the “Thinky games are for everyone” jam, three Thinky Collective games (and there’s another one in progress!), the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase, and the return of the Confounding Calendar to wrap everything up.

To close out the year, we’ve each written up a few words below about some of our highlights of 2022. You can also catch Joel’s next stream on Saturday 7th January to hear his thoughts on the year’s thinky events!

In terms of thinky puzzle games I enjoyed this year, I have a pretty nice resource for looking back: I started my Thinky Puzzles Quarterly series at the beginning of 2022, and those lists contain a lot of my favorite small puzzle-webgames that I spend time on. In particular, a few from early in the year stand out in my mind:

• Tres Undos ⁠— one of the best time-travel puzzle games I’ve played.
• Geode ⁠— a lesson in compact, thematic puzzle design.
• Dordle ⁠— I look back fondly on the Wordle-inspired gold rush, and Dordle was my sweet spot.

The commercial thinky game I enjoyed the most this year was Patrick’s Parabox ⁠— I don’t expect that to be a very niche or unique recommendation, but it was eagerly anticipated for good reason, and worth the wait. The brain-bending recursive mechanics were a delight, and I loved the very friendly difficulty curve that let me see most of the ideas the game had to offer and then allowed me to branch deeper where I felt the desire.

I felt spoiled for good mobile game offerings this year, and spent a lot more time actually playing games on my phone than I ever have before. Here were my favorites:

• Knotwords ⁠— the latest from Zach Gage, a wonderful word-logic-puzzle.
• Loopy Wizard ⁠— a zany new broughlike from the designer of Seven Scrolls.
• Otteretto ⁠— it looks like Tetris… but it’s about planning out palindromes.
• Dice Versa (iOS, Android) ⁠— a great little dice game. See my review here.

There’s so much to talk about from 2022 that I could go on for a while, but I’ll keep it brief: I played lots of great boardgames, diving into Root and The Crew with my friends, made some games that I’m quite proud of, and had a great time running the 2nd Confounding Calendar. Finally, one of the biggest things that happened for me this year was launching Thinky Games! It’s been an incredible opportunity and experience for me so far, and I’m quite grateful to be working with this team.

Whew, what a year. 2022 came and went just as quickly. The launch of ThinkyGames.com was the biggest highlight of my year, after pouring a lot of effort into it. Now, I work with an amazing team alongside a growing, supportive community!

Being a language nerd, both Knotwords and Wordle really spoiled me — I enjoyed thinking through their daily puzzles, with often surprising results at the end! Not to mention plenty of cool smaller puzzle games ⁠— like Mai-Chan’s Sweet Buns, a match-3 order matching game (try saying that three times fast!), and of course, PUNKCAKE Délicieux’s Rush for the Ages that delighted my inner history nerd.

I also attended Alt-Shift-Play at the Telekom Museum in Kuala Lumpur. Hosted by Chad Toprak, Helen Kwok, and Ho Hsin Yang, this 3 day curated exhibition featured some pretty neat Australian video games, with some fascinating puzzle games in the mix!

I’m really looking forward to expanding my puzzle game repertoire in 2023, but I must say 2022 was a great year for puzzle games as a whole.

Writing the monthly new releases articles has made me realize just how many excellent games have been coming out, but okay, I’ll narrow it down to a few that really stood out!

• The Case of the Golden Idol ⁠— Ever since Return of the Obra Dinn, I’ve been craving more games that actually make me feel like a detective, but they’re few and far between. The Case of the Golden Idol seemed to appear from nowhere and provided such an excellent whodunnit experience.
• Patrick’s Parabox ⁠— It’s always a delight to play a game with short, snappy puzzles. Patrick’s Parabox is wonderfully elegant and its excellent puzzles show off every aspect of the mechanics, taking them to extremely abstract places.
• Taiji ⁠— An excellent homage to The Witness, with plenty of great puzzle design and secrets to be discovered, Taiji still manages to stand out on its own merits. Its large pen-and-paper style puzzles are extremely satisfying to solve. (Psst, I wrote a review about it!)

Speaking of pen-and-paper puzzles, LOK was also a particular highlight of 2022. It was such a delight to sit down away from the screen with a book of beautifully formatted puzzles. I love the moment it basically just says “This puzzle is solvable. Figure out the rules.” ⁠— I had no idea how well non-verbal tutorialization could work in paper puzzle form. Oh, and there’s a digital version coming next year for those who don’t care to scribble all over a physical book.

This year, I also had the opportunity to help out Draknek & Friends with organizing the very first Cerebral Puzzle Showcase on Steam, a celebration of all the wonderful puzzle games that often go overlooked. It was a lot of fun and a great sign of things to come for the genre.

One final personal highlight is that 2022 was the year that I conquered two absolute juggernauts of the thinky universe: Bean and Nothingness and The Golem. Both extremely challenging and rewarding in equal measures — no thinky game can stop me now!

I’ve been lucky enough to play some great thinky (and thinky-adjacent) games this year, including the fantastic Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon, a stellar action puzzle title from the great people of Yacht Club Games, or the surreal and serine Nomori: Prologue, a mind being puzzle adventure I look forward to seeing fully released. I even got a few surprises, like The Entropy Centre, a Portal-inspired puzzle game that proved to be one of my favorite games to play and review this year. If every year can give me great games like these, I’ll be more than happy!

Aside from the great games, it’s been a major year for me as a writer. When I was first approached earlier this year about being involved with ThinkyGames.com, I was still studying for my master’s degree and had been trying hard to make my way into this industry and begin a proper career. You know, one that pays and that I enjoy. Since then, I’ve been to industry events, met some fantastic developers and writers, and been lucky enough to come out of university into a career I truly enjoy.

On top of all that, it’s a real treat and shock that I can say I write about awesome video games and have become part of a brilliant community (that’s you reading this!) and a fantastic team after putting my time and energy into it. So yes, that’s a definite highlight for me.

Thanks to everyone who has read our work or checked out the site at any point. We appreciate your support and can’t wait to show you more great thinky games in 2023!

That’s all, folks! Thanks for supporting our site throughout the year and the thinky games genre in general. If you haven’t done so yet, you can subscribe to our newsletter to get all the thinky news delivered right to your inbox. We hope you have a great new year and that your 2023 is filled with the thinkiest of thinkiness!