Our top five thinky picks from Ludum Dare 55

Ludum Dare is back and with a bountiful crop of puzzle games! If you’re unfamiliar with the event, Ludum Dare is a famous online game jam where developers from all over the world try to create a game in either 48 or 72 hours (depending on the modality they choose) using a common theme. Making a game within these limitations is incredibly hard, but watching all that creativity being unleashed never disappoints.

This time, the theme was ‘Summoning’, so we got a bunch of games about demons, alchemy, and other magical shenanigans. We played a bunch of entries and have picked five games for you to check out. These are by no means the “five best games from the game jam” but five entries we found charming and deserved some attention. Enjoy!

Burn with me by Nozomu Games is a “demonic deckbuilder” with no opponents. You place cards in a pentagram, those cards give you points, and there’s a threshold you need to overcome. On top of building a good deck and making smart combos, you also need to balance sacrifices. There are a few mechanics that give you a boost in exchange for removing a card from your deck permanently, but if you are not careful you’ll run out of cards to play. The goal is to survive 13 rounds and use five cards to summon Exodia Satan.

Stars Align by cassowary, you are a cute lizard moving boxes around with the help of your magic wand. But instead of pushing these boxes into buttons, you need to place them in a way that triggers a magic light sigil. It’s delightful to play and I enjoyed seeing the wizard lizard moving around and using its wand while solving the puzzles. I hope we keep getting more games in the future featuring animals who also happen to be wizards, they’re the best.

This game is from Daniel Mullins, the developer behind games like Inscryption or Pony Island. It’s sort of an auto battler where you’re assembling a jury that will decide the verdict of a trial. It has some interesting synergies, like when you hire a jury that is voting innocent, but they will influence others to vote guilty. And, as you would expect given his previous works, it has a couple of fun twists that will shake up your expectations. Inscryption started as a Ludum Dare prototype, so I wonder if we’ll see an expanded version of Voir Dire in the future.

If Only by Le Slo is a short masterclass on making a sokoban-like. You can tell the developer has quite a lot of experience with the genre. At first, you are just pushing candles around in your usual grid, but more and more mechanics are introduced as a natural expansion of the initial space. It’s not that they’re adding more elements to the puzzles, you discover new side effects of the core rules. It’s charming, but also quite challenging, you’ve been warned.

In theGRIMOIRE_ by 0x0961h you need to push buttons and access a door, and you need to use certain skills to accomplish this goal. It sounds quite traditional, but the twist comes when you realize those skills are activated by replicating a certain movement pattern. For example, moving up, left, then down will create a useful clone that you can use to press two buttons at the same time. And did I mention the game vibes? They’re excellent and eerie.