We played all of the 84 Cerebral Puzzle Showcase demos (yes, really)

Sergiu Dumitriu, 9 June 2025

The ever-growing Cerebral Puzzle Showcase returned again this year, a huge annual Steam event celebrating thinky games and puzzle games with big sales, lots of new releases, and many, many demos for upcoming games.

If the number of demos is a little intimidating, have no fear! We've played all - yes, all - the demos that were part of the showcase and have listed them all here. The Cerebral Puzzle Showcase might be over but many of the event's demos are still active, and we've also included links out to each game's Steam demo page. Playing these demos and adding them to your Steam wishlist is the best way to support the puzzle game community so we encourage you to wishlist away!

Also, if you missed it, Thinky Games was part of the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase with our very own event! The Thinky Direct featured big announcements, exclusive trailers, brand new demos. You can watch the showcase in its entirety in the video below.

Cute, Cosy, Charming, Cerebral

Don’t be fooled by the charming looks of these games, they can still challenge even experienced puzzle players. Still, they are a good way to introduce thinky games to those not used to games in which you must stop and think.

Bento Blocks

Taking inspiration from Inbento, in Bento Blocks you have to pack sushi into boxes. After a few block puzzle levels in which you just have to fit all the pieces in the box, the true mechanic of the game shows up: you have to cut some pieces to fit in. Each cut counts, and to get a perfect score, you have to solve the puzzle using the given number of cuts, but it’s OK if you can’t figure out the optimal solution; you’ll just get fewer stars. At least in the two chapters in the demo, it doesn’t go too deep, but some levels are surprisingly challenging.

Try the demo: Bento Blocks

The Diary

A cozy game with all the gameplay taking place inside a diary. Discover the story of two characters falling in and out of love at different times. Puzzles are simple, like arranging lines of a chat in the proper order, figuring out which two items from a menu add up to the right bill total, packing a bag by dragging items into it, taking a photo of the right thing, and so on. If Your House is an interactive book, and A Normal Lost Phone is an interactive phone, The Diary is an interactive diary.

Try the demo: The Diary

EMUUROM

Platformer, metroidvania, weird creatures, pixel graphics, collectathon, secrets? If you liked Animal Well, you’ll like EMUUROM too! Armed with nothing but what looks like a Tricorder, discover all the secrets of the Emuurom fauna and flora, and use them to reach new places. Outsmart the many creatures living in this strange world, scan everything to learn about it, find hidden shortcuts and unexpected paths, try to decipher the weird language, and most importantly, have fun in the land of EMUUROM!

Try the demo: EMUUROM

Lost Twins II

A cozy puzzle platformer in which you play as two twins (co-op optional), collecting magical feathers. Each level consists of 3 rooms that you can rearrange in a 2x2 grid, so that when two openings align between two adjacent rooms, you can move between them. The puzzles are not trivial, and the nice graphics will appeal to a younger audience, so this is a great thinky game one can play with the kids. If you enjoyed The Pedestrian and its room connection puzzles, you’ll enjoy this too.

Try the demo: Lost Twins II

Map Map

The goal of Map Map is to… map maps! More seriously, this tests your orientation skills. You can roam 3D environments, islands full of trees, cliffs, ruins and monuments, and your goal is to mark on a very simple map exactly where a certain landmark is. After solving the easier levels, you are awarded tools that can help you better estimate distances in real life and on the map. But these are just mechanical tools, and just like how a basic calculator doesn't solve all math but speeds up calculations, so do the tools in Map Map only help you if you know what you’re doing. Like a good detective game offering minimal clues that you must piece together, so does Map Map become increasingly more thinky, with clues like “the building that’s 4 paces long”, sketches that must be interpreted, and partial treasure maps that require digging in a precise spot.

Try the demo: Map Map

Poke ALL Toads

The title says it all: you must poke all toads. More seriously, the goal is indeed to poke all the toads in each level and then reach the exit with the blue fairy. But while sleepy frogs will merely wake up, already awake frogs don't like to be poked and will try to eat you, so the goal is to either find a way to block their view of you, or to trick them into eating a different fairy. Although it starts easy, this game does deserve its spot in the cerebral showcase, since it does get quite thinky in the later levels.

Try the demo: Poke ALL Toads

Slip 'n Slime

A sliding pathfinding game in which you control a slippery slime trying to find its way across the world. Unlike most sliding games taking place in small square levels, this one takes an open world approach with sometimes huge levels taking many minutes to fully explore. And besides the simple sliding mechanics, there are a lot of good surprises as well, like rivers that take you along with them, crumbling floors, pushable crates, grates that turn you into a smaller slime, sticky gum, and many others. And the graphical quality is great, cute and cozy, and despite the beautiful animations, the game feels super fast to control.

Try the demo: Slip 'n Slime

Spectacle: Worlds Unseen

Psst! Hey! Yes, you! Wanna play a puzzle game with a cute baby animal with absurdly basic abilities that’s actually very challenging? And no, I’m not talking about Toki Tori 2+, but about Spectacle. You play as a newly hatched lizard who, other than moving around, can close its eyes! And wear glasses! More seriously, the game is a 3D exploration puzzle. Throughout the levels there are different objects that react to your eyes, most predominantly eyes that trigger an effect when you point the mouse over them and close both eyes, and quantum superposition objects that exist in two states, and closing one eye makes only one of those two states materialize. Cool concept, and cool puzzles!

Try the demo: Spectacle: Worlds Unseen

Trifolium

Or The Giraffe Game, a 3D open world puzzle game in which you play as a giraffe with a really long neck, snaking around an ever expanding world. Normally you can’t climb up, but certain spots do raise your head high up, allowing you to climb over yourself or to reach higher platforms. And there’s a mysterious collection of rings that you must pass through, with surprising mechanics. It is a lovely game full of discoveries, one that seems to have enchanted all those who tried it.

Try the demo: Trifolium

Zombiology

A cartoony game inspired by the real science of protein folding, about connecting basic segments to form chains of the right shape. The story is that you’re building molecules to heal injured zombies. Starting with a bunch of “codons”, simple shapes like circles, squares, rectangles and elbows, you must connect them in the right way to make the shape that best fits in the wound. And among the many possible chains that would fit the target, you must also maximize the score by placing similar shapes together. There are more aspects to the game, since often it’s not just the final target shape that matters, but sometimes you have to make it flexible enough to fit through a tunnel, or you need to make intermediary helper shapes that let you spin gears, turn a valve or hold open a flipping gate. It’s also very cute, with funny characters and situations.

Try the demo: Zombiology

Sokoban is not just pushing boxes

From its humble beginnings as a “warehouse keeper” (the literal translation of the Japanese name), the genre evolved a lot, with modern games so far removed from the early “busy work” that they hardly seem related. These games use the premise of pushing boxes only as one of their mechanics, the basic foundation on top of which they build masterpieces with their own unique approach.

Enlightening

Sokoban with roombas. Instead of moving in the direction you’re pressing, the robots move forward relative to the direction they’re facing, and left/right just mean rotate counter/clockwise. The controls take a while to get used to, and the first puzzles are quite trivial, but it gets interesting when you can control multiple robots, each moving their own way.

Try the demo: Enlightening

Inbox Unbox

Both this and Patrick's Parabox were inspired by the same game, but took the original concept into different directions. Boxes within boxes, infinite recursion, fractal mazes… While Patrick's Parabox focused on easier puzzles that showcase neat mechanics, Inbox Unbox opted for harder levels that challenge players from the start.

Try the demo: Inbox Unbox

Olaf the Boozer

Sokoban meets the hit movie The Hangover in a medieval fantasy world. Play as a dwarf after an epic bender from which you don’t remember anything, trying to piece together the events of last night and to fix everything that you and your rowdy friends broke. The gameplay involves solving Sokoban levels in reverse, pulling boxes, uncrashing furniture, moving through the places you’ve been. Great game, good and funny story, and the demo hints at a mysterious plot.

Try the demo: Olaf the Boozer

One More Button

One more “the allowed moves are in the level” game, in which you can’t just press the keys on the keyboard (or a controller), you must click on the buttons in the level. Most of the time, they are also boxes you can push and rotate, so you may start a level with just right and down boxes, and you have to move those boxes around to turn one of them into an up button using the Reset button which also acts like a box turning mechanism. What complicates things even more is that you have two different colors of buttons, each with their own undo and redo buttons, so you must coordinate two different timelines. It has a lot of interesting ideas, promising really challenging levels.

Try the demo: One More Button

Putty Putter

A sokoban game in which you don’t simply push boxes with a regular movable character, but with a sentient putty that can grow at will. Learn to shape yourself in the right way, growing into the right shape to fit narrow paths or into the right size to push heavier boxes. To someone used to sokobans, this is a fresh new challenge, since the mechanics are very unfamiliar, but such a nice challenge! Well designed levels, lovely mechanics, and plenty of levels to keep one occupied in the demo for a few hours.

Try the demo: Putty Putter

Puzzle Depot

A very well themed open world puzzle adventure with a story, puzzles embedded in the world, upgrades, exploration, secrets and optimizations. You have to explore a factory with a very poor safety record, solving puzzles that involve boxes, barrels, annoying robots, toxic spills, lazy coworkers, huge bugs, explosives, and many other world objects.

Try the demo: Puzzle Depot

Snow Cone

Prepare the perfect snow cone by rolling snowballs and scooping them up. This feels a lot like A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build, except that instead of building snowpeople on the ground, you must scoop up the balls into your cone. Rolling a ball over unpacked snow makes it bigger, and you have a specific target to build, like four balls of size one on top of each other, or 4-3-2-1 sequence, or any other sequence the puzzle may require. There are many other mechanics to discover, including movable boxes, slippery ice, sinking water. Too many explanations at the start for my taste, but that’s perfect for puzzle novices. And by the end of the demo it had me stumped a few times.

Try the demo: Snow Cone

Snowmelt Manor

This feels a lot like A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build. There are patches of snow on the ground, and by pushing them you can form boxes of compact snow. You must then push these boxes on buttons that unlock both the gates to exit the room, and a display case in which you must put collectibles. There are more mechanics to discover, with snowmowers, wooden crates, water and others, all used in clever puzzles. And while at first each level is standalone, the open world structure does lead eventually to across-world meta-puzzling and hard to reach secrets.

Try the demo: Snowmelt Manor

Sokobos 2

A sequel that is more focused: push vases into your big crate. There are rivers, and heavy rocks, and ice, and you can push everything including the target crate. Clever puzzles showcasing the interesting mechanics, but very few, leaving me wanting more.

Try the demo: Sokobos 2

Squid Grid

An underwater-themed puzzle game in which you play with squids, lobsters, seashells, pufferfish and other creatures, each with its own mechanics, in a game that is so much more than just a sokoban. Excellent mechanics, excellent levels, very good QoL, this is looking like one of the best games of the year.

Try the demo: Squid Grid

Theta and Paralldoxs on Worldlines

Help Theta find her way to the exit. But she has quantum powers! What does that mean? She can split in two, with both instances moving in sync (when possible). So in essence, it’s a game of guiding two avatars to the exit at the same time, but the game does fantastic things with the quantum superposition premise. What happens when one instance cannot move in the intended direction? What happens when there’s not enough room to split? What happens when you push a box in two different directions? The levels are really clever, but then the game pulls a Paquerette and reveals a fantastic new layer that I’m not going to spoil.

Try the demo: Theta and Paralldoxs on Worldlines

Detectives in disguise

For the past few years, we’ve been living through a renaissance of great detective games. And the future looks bright too, no matter how dark and gloomy the atmosphere in these demos feels. There are a lot of games building on the good templates set by The Return of the Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden Idol, but adding their own unique spin.

City of Voices

A detective game much like The Golden Idol, but with pixel graphics. The demo just has a “cute” story about kids going to camp, and you must figure out why did a girl fall, where are they going on a car trip, and who pulled a prank. But the full game, starting right after the demo, involves a mysterious Mayan village. You have to look at the pictures, inspect objects, and deduce the names of the people involved, who do the objects belong to, and fill in one or more statements explaining what happened. Well done levels, with lots of clues that are hard to notice, but everything makes sense once you get it.

Try the demo: City of Voices

The Mermaid Mask

A sequel to Detective Grimoire, a detective game with a point&click / adventure game feel. Investigate the Mortuga submarine to solve the mystery of the recently departed captain, murdered in a locked room with nothing but an old cauldron as the only suspect. The production quality is great, with fully voiced characters, good graphics, good music, and lots of details to inspect.

Try the demo: The Mermaid Mask

Mind Diver

A detective game in which you explore the memories of a person who is quickly forgetting things, trying to figure out the whereabouts of their missing partner. As a mind diver, you explore static 3D representations of a half-forgotten memory. You can inspect objects and listen to snippets of conversation, and find out which object or person should be in place of the memory holes, represented as actual holes in the world. Somebody is talking about picking up “headphones”, so find the one object that looks like that and put it in its place. Someone is talking to Markus, and a conversation earlier mentioned that he’s wearing a labcoat, so find the one person wearing a labcoat to fill in the memory hole. The missing persons report was written by the police officer with badge number 12345, go look for the person wearing that badge to put them behind the desk. Well done deduction game with a fresh new approach to the genre.

Try the demo: Mind Diver

The Séance of Blake Manor

3D First person detective game with Golden Idol-inspired mechanics, time management, escape room aspects, nice looking comic-book graphics, a spooky setting, and a lot of other nice things. Investigate a disappearance somewhere in Ireland at the end of the 19th century, around a convention of mystics and seers. Investigate the hotel, talk to the many colorful characters, try to gain their trust, survive the horror and figure out what happened to the missing Evelyn Deane.

Try the demo: The Séance of Blake Manor

Strange Antiquities

You just started an apprenticeship at the town’s thaumaturge (seller of magical items), and now you’re left in charge of the store before you even got your first lesson. You must figure out what each client wants by inspecting the objects in the store, the lore books, the hidden buttons and mechanisms, reading your mail, visiting your neighbors, etc. This is a good detective game! But more than that, it also feels like an escape room at times, and like an interactive visual novel, and a horror game, and a dice game! 

Try the demo: Strange Antiquities

Surradia: An Art Retrospective

A deduction game in which you must piece together the lives of a group of artists living in Paris around the start of WWII. From minimal clues you can gather from small handwritten notes, photos, newspaper articles, paintings and other artifacts, you must deduce what happened, filling in sentences by choosing the right words from dropdowns. Like a good Golden Idol case, the story got a good grip on my conscious and subconscious, suddenly making a connection, uncovering the hidden meaning of a word in a letter hours after I turned off the game. If you like detective games like Golden Idol or The Roottrees Are Dead, give this one a try too.

Try the demo: Surradia: An Art Retrospective

Wax Heads

A kind of detective story with a musical theme. The premise sounds cozy and simple, as a new record store employee you must help patrons get the music they want. The truth is that “the client is always right” rarely holds, since the client doesn’t even know what they want. You get the girlfriend trying to surprise her boyfriend with “that album from that band where the guy left”, or the girl who wants “the new album of her favorite singer”, or you get a dad stuck in a mascot costume that muffles everything they say and you must find the album that may or may not be loud or about cats or new or old. But if you carefully investigate the people, the store and the albums, you will find an answer. The “new” album has a label saying it’s new. Reading the liner notes of the albums you will find out which is the band that had their singer leave. The client may sport a tattoo of their favorite band. It is a true deduction game in the vein of The Golden Idol, but with many more “cases” each day. There are also a lot of side activities, like playing an arcade game, designing posters, packing things, and there’s also an overall story about two estranged sisters.

Try the demo: Wax Heads

Jump smarter, not harder

From the more action oriented Woten DX to the very thinky Glowkeeper, these puzzle platformers cover a wide range of difficulty in terms of both agility and thinkyness.

Compress(space)

A puzzle platformer in which you can remove parts of the world, whole horizontal or vertical strips. This lets you remove walls between rooms, move platforms closer together, remove obstacles that are blocking boxes, but also push a button with a wall. Not everything can be removed though, otherwise the game would be too easy. The levels in the demo are not too challenging, but more of a showcase of interesting things you can do with these special mechanics.

Try the demo: Compress(space)

FORKLIFT FLOWERPOT

I have played similar games that call themselves “puzzle” games, but with barely any puzzle elements, and I think this one might actually deserve the label. After a very brief tutorial about picking up and dropping down items that had me worried it will also be a simple driving simulator, you get to the real game. And it is a bizarre one, with weird creatures and plants, strange weather, cryptic goals, changing environments, and… card games? You can freely change the seasons, and many world elements change with the seasons: bouncy mushrooms in the harvest seasons, windy paths that let you fly between islands in the windy season, and extra bridges in the rainy season. And as a forklift, you can move things around when you need an extra bounce somewhere else, or when certain plants only reveal their power in a certain environment.

Try the demo: FORKLIFT FLOWERPOT

Glowkeeper

Excellent puzzle platformer game with Sokoban and Match3 mechanics, and a touch of metroidbrainia. The demo does a great job at surprising us with unexpected mechanics, with so many impossible dead ends that turn out to be a nifty new trick to discover. The full game has even more surprises, with puzzles involving more than one room, and different solutions for achieving different objectives in the same room, but I won't go into more details, since discovering the game on your own is a fun challenge. 

Try the demo: Glowkeeper

How Old is James?

A puzzle platformer with changing mechanics. Each level has three distinct fragments, each one played with a different “character” with its own mechanics. One can move and simple/double/wall jump like in a regular platformer. One can flip gravity, including by just pushing against a wall. One can slingshot, even mid-air. The levels are 2D, but taking place in the walls of a tower, wrapping around the building, and occasionally you get to spin the floors to make new connections between them. Feels like a solid trick platformer, and it even has a story. 

Try the demo: How Old is James?

Light of Atlantis

A 2D puzzle platformer in which you play as a spirit taking control of different robotic bodies, each with their abilities. Explore the sunken city of Atlantis, raising and lowering the water level, fighting off sea creatures, puzzling your way through locked gates. Smart puzzles, many mechanics, good graphics.

Try the demo: Light of Atlantis

Miss Paint

A puzzle platformer that takes place inside an image editor. Each image is a sketch with different colors, each with a special meaning. In the image there are also buttons that you can activate once to perform a small change in the level: fill in a black rectangle, or copy/move/rotate/rescale a part of the image. But not all colors can be altered, blue is especially obstructive since it not only cannot be moved, but prevents other colors from even moving over. The goal is to touch all green areas. The levels can be surprisingly thinky, many times you need three platforms but you can only use two tools, or rotating something seems impossible since blue is in the way. A good theme, used in clever ways!

Try the demo: Miss Paint

NODE

A puzzle platformer that you don’t control directly, but pre-program. The premise is that you’re a not fully autonomous robot exploring a nuclear disaster site, and the radiation makes it impossible to remotely control the robot in real time, so instructions must be sent in batches whenever the signal is strong enough. So you’ll have to write short sequences like “move forward for 3.6 seconds, jump, break for 0.5 seconds, spin around, move forward for 7.2 seconds”. If that doesn’t work, edit the program and try again from the starting point. Interesting idea, good theme, and the potential for solution optimization might appeal to fans of zachlikes.

Try the demo: NODE

Öoo

A puzzle platformer in which you play as an exploding caterpillar. You cannot jump, but you can detach fragments of your body and explode them, which blasts you upwards or sideways. The demo showcases the mechanics well, especially when two bombs are in use, and despite being just 5-10 minutes long, it impressed me with its clear levels and cute pixel graphics. But help! I still don’t know what the chicken is for!

Try the demo: Öoo

Playhead

Platforming in a dynamic environment that plays like a YouTube video. You control both the titular Playhead character, moving and jumping inside a video of a level, and the state of the level using the video’s progress bar. Find the right moment in the video when two platforms are close enough to jump between them, or quickly advance the video to jump over a huge gap, or just let the video play while you move around the dynamic environment. Small levels that focus on clever tricks instead of arduous precision platforming, with plenty of Aha! moments. The theming is done well, with video comments offering comic relief or gentle hints.

Try the demo: Playhead

Vextorial

A puzzle platformer with interesting mechanics. You can switch between a 2D view of just the room you are in, in which gravity changes whenever you touch one of the walls or the ceiling, and a 3D view in which you can move between different rooms, but whichever way Down is doesn’t change. Interesting multi-room levels, with more complex mechanics added in each chapter, making the solutions even more challenging.

Try the demo: Vextorial

Woten DX - Traveller's Dream

A puzzle platformer that does both things well. There’s plenty of hidden collectibles to hunt down, action scenes, clever platforming, and, as a good little viking, plenty of stomping and headbutting to do. The game looks gorgeous, taking place across lush environments that don’t feel artificial.

Try the demo: Woten DX - Traveller's Dream

Surviving the test chambers

Realistic 3D environments, seamlessly interconnected chambers in a huge open world, an antagonistic (un)friendly narrator, special powers. For many, Portal may be their first (or only) experience with puzzle games, and every year there are a lot of releases trying to copy it in hopes of achieving the same level of success. And there are a lot of games in the near future promising a lot of thinky fun.

The Art of Reflection

A 3D puzzle game in which you have the special ability to move to what you see. Simply spot a red orb, zoom in on it, and you’ll find yourself next to it. Sounds simple, but it gets challenging when you add movable mirrors, keys that you must flip to match the locks, the ability to stop midway through your flight to the orb, glass panels that block your power, or maze-like levels. Being able to teleport to a different place feels a bit like Portal, and yes, among the many Portal wannabes, this one looks like a promising worthy candidate.

Try the demo: The Art of Reflection

ARTIFICIAL

A first-person environmental platformer set in a post-apocalyptic factory. Tasked with a simple job of turning on a power generator, things go awfully wrong when you accidentally fall deep into the factory, and must now brave deadly hazards to get back out alive. I for one welcome a scary game in which you don’t have to face aliens, zombies or demons, but dangerous falls, pools of radioactive waste water, a derelict electrified fence, and laser turrets that forgot how to distinguish between friends and foes.

Try the demo: ARTIFICIAL

The Button Effect

A game all about buttons. Every room in this museum dedicated to buttons has several buttons spread around, and pushing each one of them affects some of the other buttons, near or far. The goal is to activate all of the buttons, starting with just a single one that’s active in the beginning. Figuring out the rules of the game is challenging, and going from a simple room with just a few buttons, you’ll soon gain access to rooms with tens of buttons, and even get a glimpse of future rooms with maybe hundreds of them! But that’s not all, hidden behind the layer of  obvious big button puzzles lies a second layer of more cryptic puzzles, one that has you chasing butterflies and looking for hidden “buttons” that are not easy at all to spot. Very well designed puzzles spanning the entire world, with each button serving more than one purpose. Did I reach my quota for how many times I have to say “buttons”? Not yet, so, buttons buttons buttons buttons.

Try the demo: The Button Effect

ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard

Solve hard puzzles involving painting objects in different colors. The demo showcases 5 very different environments with unique puzzle mechanics, with a lot more strange worlds featured in the trailer. This is very thinky, but the demo lacks cohesion because of the choice to showcase disparate worlds. Many of the puzzles are about figuring out unexplained mechanics instead of applying known rules to complicated scenarios, which I for one like.

Try the demo: ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard

Desolus

A 3D exploration game taking place in a world stuck between two time periods. Everything seems to be in ruin, with broken stairs and bridges, but there are wormholes through which a different time peeks through, one in which those stairs and bridges were intact, or broken in a different place. You can switch between these two periods to go further on your path, and you can even pull fragments of the world through these wormholes. And there are wormholes within wormholes, and mutually exclusive fragments, so finding the right combination of fragments and timeline switches can get challenging. Great visual effects, great architecture, great Escherian levels.

Try the demo: Desolus

He Who Watches

Despite the dungeon crawler feeling that the trailer inspires, this is a proper sokoban game. But instead of a 2D grid, you play in a 3D environment in which gravity is not fixed. You can climb on any surface, and your own gravity always follows your feet. And instead of just pushing boxes, you hook them with your bow, and then they follow you at a fixed distance, until they hit a wall or you drop them, falling in the direction that your feet are pointing to. Very clever puzzles, with many emergent mechanics from just a few puzzle elements.

Try the demo: He Who Watches

Memory's Reach

A 3D first-person exploration puzzle in which you explore an alien planet full of strange and powerful artifacts. The demo starts at the end, with all the powers unlocked, then switches back to the beginning so you know what you could do if you still had the ability to interact with the alien panels, or teleport, or survive radiation, giving you an incentive to keep looking for upgrades; it has a strong pacifist metroidvania vibe. One puzzle aspect is that you can change the layout of the rooms by moving elevators and turning bridges, so you have to find the right sequence of changes that let you reach farther. Another is that some of the locks require solving a logic XOR puzzle, in which you have to find which shapes and in which orientation combine to form the target image, sometimes with networks of shapes simultaneously making several targets. There are also harder to spot memory shards that reward your curiosity, and logs filling in the story of the world for those that need extra motivation to keep playing.

Try the demo: Memory's Reach

Orbyss

Good looking game, you control one or more balls that you use to navigate a 3D environment. You must activate platforms and elevators, find your way through winding paths, free some… wispy things, coordinate between multiple balls, time your actions. Really interesting mechanics, and solid puzzles so far.

Try the demo: Orbyss

Schrodinger's Cat Burglar

A lovely game, part exploration platformer, roaming an underground lab with secret tunnels and vents, furniture to climb and stuff to knock down, computers to hack, mice to catch, and part puzzle solving, in which you can split yourself into two different cats and recombine yourself. Great mechanics, well designed puzzles, looks and sounds great, smooth controls, looking forward to the full release!

Try the demo: Schrodinger's Cat Burglar

THANKS, LIGHT.

A 3D test chambers game with a touch of horror. You seem to have been abducted by a strange creature with a lightbulb for a head, who is making you solve puzzle after puzzle armed with nothing but a flashlight. There are dark objects throughout the levels that become real once you shine your light on them. Figure out the right order of activating these objects, what to do with them, the proper way of holding them so they fit in the right shaped holes. There are strange dark ghosts watching you as well, are they friend or foe? Will you ever escape? Chapter two gives you a new power, a dark flashlight that turns objects back into their dark version, for even more challenging puzzles. The game is good, it takes a while until it gets challenging, but it proves that it’s thinky enough. Be warned that it is a bit scary, and there are a lot of strobe lights and other glitchy effects that may cause dizziness or other adverse reactions.

Try the demo: THANKS, LIGHT.

Finding the right path

Pathfinding games require you to find the right way of getting from A to B, given the constraints of the level. They may involve pushing things, but unlike a proper sokoban game, the things are not the goal, just in your way. They may involve jumping on platforms, but the focus isn’t on precision jumping, just finding a way to get across. They may involve drawing paths in a grid, but with less focus on logic rules.

AiliA

Pathfinding with a unique twist: you can use movable mirrors that reflect platforms you can actually step on! Go in and out of the mirror, move the mirror while you're inside, reach new places. There's also a story and lots of dialogue, the girl in the mirror is not actually your reflection, but your missing sister, and the mirrors hold more secrets than meets the eye. And with some harder to reach collectibles sprinkled throughout the levels, the demo is quite promising.

Try the demo: AiliA

Beyond the Board

During a boring old game of chess, all hell broke loose and now you, a lowly Rook, are stuck wandering through cavernous mazes. Navigate huge grids, learn to push buttons in the right order, learn to trick enemy pieces into a corner so you can capture them, dodge blasts from powerful queens, discover even more surreal realms. I wonder what lies at the end, so despite the early bugs, this game got me hooked.

Try the demo: Beyond the Board

Bytebond

A co-op puzzle game in which you control two robots that look a lot like BB-8. Most of the puzzles revolve around transporting energy, with each robot able to absorb two units of energy and pass it among themselves, and into batteries or engines that open gates or raise platforms, but when they carry energy they cannot pass through certain gates. There are also enemies to dodge or destroy in fast-paced action sequences, and time sensitive races, and a story and beautiful environments, for an overall high quality game that's more than just abstract puzzles.

Try the demo: Bytebond

HAMSTERMIND

Explore the secret chambers of a pyramid as the legendary archeologist Hamster Jones! Each room in Hamstermind has two types of games, one in which you must explore a maze consisting of several zones that can be rotated, and one in which you must rotate a grid with falling scarabs to lead them to their target spots. This is a good game, with nice graphics, charming characters, progressively harder levels that will surely be entertaining for the whole family.

Try the demo: HAMSTERMIND

The Lilliput Workshop

A rail design game, lay down tracks for trains to carry shapes around. This mixes the path tracing and factory building genres really well, since not only you have to move between the right “stations” along the way, but you must build complex towers from basic shapes by taking them from shape generators, milling them, squishing them, painting them, stacking them in the right order, and finally delivering them. And the tracks are also dynamic, with track switches allowing multiple passes to get more than one shape from the limited generators. And you don’t just have to lay down tracks, you may also be required to decide where the train starts, where to put the generators and shape modifiers, and there’s different terrain types meaning that not every object can go everywhere. A really clever game that I’m looking forward to.

Try the demo: The Lilliput Workshop

A Little Perspective

An isometric pathfinding game in a world where things that look adjacent become adjacent, like in Chronescher, or in certain Monument Valley levels. But one extra mechanic makes this really interesting: you can’t move where you can't see. The levels in the demo are mostly easy and are great for showcasing the mechanics, but the secret bonus levels that you need to find by thoroughly exploring the open world level selection are really challenging and hint at much harder levels in the full game.

Try the demo: A Little Perspective

Observe

A unique game in which you must solve a global solution to a huge problem step by step. In a big space consisting of different areas, you must guide your character across each area, but not just doing things for yourself, but for every other character you can see. Things happen when you look at them, to hold open a barrier you must look at the button that activates it. You help your neighbor on the left, and the neighbor on the right helps you. The simple solution you did before many rooms ago will need to be adjusted to also help a new neighbor that just sprung up next to it. Solve, refine, progress, refine, carefully orchestrate all the characters, always observing each other, until you get a miracle of a solution spanning multiple characters in multiple areas, all taking place in just a few seconds. A very clever new idea for a game.

Try the demo: Observe

PANIK

The Paniks are creatures that, well, panic! Only the ones that wear a crown don’t panic, and they alone can calm down everybody else. A Paniker who doesn’t have a connection to a crown wearer cannot move. The goal is to move one Paniker onto each target spot. Other than the crown wearers, there are different types of Panikers with different powers, like the basic one who can move at most 3 spots away at a time, one that clones itself when it moves, leaving a copy behind, one that moves like a rook, only on the same row but unlimited tiles away, one that can wrap around the edges of the level, one that can fly over holes, and many others. What makes it really challenging is that each Paniker can only move a few times, some not at all even if they’re not panicked. A really clever pathfinding game, with plenty of mechanics showcased in the demo.

Try the demo: PANIK

Park It!

While the name makes me think of poorly made mobile games, this is actually a thinky game. All you have to do is park a car, but that is surprisingly difficult. You have the basic forward, backward, and L shaped turns in a grid, so what could make this so hard? Well, for starters, you must solve it in optimal moves. Then there are the slippery oil patches that move you one more tile, and the rubber walls that make your L turns become simple I turns, and the traffic lights, and the spinning tiles, and I’m sure even more mechanics in the full game.

Try the demo: Park It!

Shape Sender Deluxe

A physics game in which you must build paths for shapes to go between a source and a target. Place blocks, magnets, bouncy platforms and other objects along the way, affecting the path of each shape. I’ve seen this done a few times successfully, and this one looks promising too. The placement of objects is restricted to a grid, making it a lot less finicky, instead trying to find the pixel-perfect position on a solution that might not actually work, you know if something is impossible. There’s a story, good sounds, simple and clean graphics, a good game that fans of thinky physics games will surely like.

Try the demo: Shape Sender Deluxe

Shards Between Us

A pathfinding and resource management game with more than two dimensions in which you can alter the environment with plants. Each level requires you to collect and carry a big shard of glass to the exit. Since the shard is so big and heavy, normally you can’t just climb up while holding it. You can’t even climb up on your own normally, but there are flowers that can help with that. You can also find seeds in the level, and you can plant big sunflowers that act as stairs for yourself and elevators for the shard if they grow under it, and ivy seeds that slowly spread throughout the level and that let you cling to walls. Nice concept and clever puzzles.

Try the demo: Shards Between Us

Sliding Hero

A mixture of a lot of genres (puzzles, resource riddles, RPG, metroidvania), but the root mechanic is sliding. Find your way across a big open world, collect weapons and fight enemies in the right order, gain new abilities and revisit old places. Other than the interesting gameplay, the game has a unique look/story, with giants/gods aiding or impeding you.

Try the demo: Sliding Hero

Spooky Express

Congratulations! You’ve just been hired to design the rides at the new theme park! Your goal is to draw a train track that will take every type of “person” to their correct home. Except that the vampires and zombies are not just costumed actors, but actual undead. Can you take all the vampires to their coffins, all the zombies to their graves, and keep all the park visitors safe? Another good release from Draknek, making the Cosmic Express genre more accessible and modern.

Try the demo: Spooky Express

Trackastrophe!

Place arrows on the grid to change the direction the train is going, so it collects all the collectibles, doesn’t crash, and reaches the exit. The lack of tracks, the ability to jump, tunnels and other mechanics make this a puzzle with very non-linear solutions. Quite good puzzles, and a very retro look inspired by the ancient cartoons.

Try the demo: Trackastrophe!

Void Carrier

A sliding pathfinding game with limited moves. Each level gives you, for example, 3 Up, 2 Left, 3 Right and 0 Down moves, so the goal is to find which path through the level lets you reach the end using only these moves. And each area has its own special mechanics, like one with portals, one with one way gates, or one with a limited number of jumps over holes. While move counters are generally frowned upon, this game manages to use them in a clever way.

Try the demo: Void Carrier

Let’s see you find a way out of this one!

From small escape rooms, through escape mansions, and all the way to escape islands, these games will really test your thinking skills. What I like most about escape room style games is their huge variety of challenges, while most puzzle games have one core mechanic, escape rooms have something new in every corner.

Agent of Veil

An escape room game with a secret agent theme, much like Agent A, which was an inspiration for this game. The demo takes place in a large floating house with lots of rooms, and there are plenty of unique puzzles to solve, codes to crack, objects to click, collectibles to collect, riddles to solve, hidden compartments to spot, wires to uncross, and so many others.

Try the demo: Agent of Veil

CRT7

In my humble opinion, most of the games labeled “Psychological Horror” do not deserve that label, but this game doesn't even have that label and yet more than deserves it. Stuck in a basement surrounded by ancient tech, time seems to have lost all meaning. Days seem to pass in minutes. Things appear out of nowhere. An old computer from the 80s somehow is compatible with your smartphone and just installed “something” on it. But behind the brilliantly done atmosphere of the game you can find lots of clever puzzles, from simple games you can play on the old computer, cryptic ciphers hidden in notebooks, escape room style physical puzzles, and many more.

Try the demo: CRT7

Dimhaven Enigmas

A 3D first-person Myst-like game taking place on a remote island. Investigate the once popular, now deserted island of Dimhaven trying to find your missing uncle. Lots of puzzles to solve, feeling a lot like the old Myst games and less like the modern virtual escape room games. You’ll have to keep going back and forth between the same places on the island, slowly unlocking more and more doors, drawers and porta potties, understanding what an old clue means, why you’re still carrying that slip of paper around, and finally gaining access to the next major area. It takes patience and concentration, and it looks like a good future release from the makers of Quern.

Try the demo: Dimhaven Enigmas

Escape Simulator 2

The first Escape Simulator is considered one of the best escape room games, so the sequel has a good chance to be good too. And there’s a lot I liked in this demo: the puzzles are varied and clever, bonus challenges if you perfect every level, the game runs smoothly, good support for multiple players to participate in the same game.

Try the demo: Escape Simulator 2

The House of Tesla

From the makers of The House of Da Vinci, this one feels very similar, except that instead of a magical eyepiece that lets you see the past, you have an electric apparatus that lets you move electricity around. A more realistic escape room game with decent puzzles, more about manipulating objects than solving mental riddles. If you like this type of escape rooms, like The Room series and The House of Da Vinci, this is a nice new addition to the genre.

Try the demo: The House of Tesla

How 2 Escape: Lost Submarine

An escape room puzzle that is supposed to be played by two people, one doing the actual playing on a PC or console, and another handling the second half of the clues on a phone or a second PC (for free). The main player sees a symbol, the other one says what number it corresponds to. The main finds a code, the secondary enters it in the phone to unlock a hint. Nice gameplay idea, and the game looks good.

Try the demo: How 2 Escape: Lost Submarine

Lighthouse of Madness

A psychological horror escape room. A strange mineral discovered in the old mines seems to unlock a portal to another world. Strange ghosts cross your path. Doors opening and closing by themselves. Horrifying flesh-like plants growing on the walls. And where is everybody? Can you puzzle through before your sanity runs out?

Try the demo: Lighthouse of Madness

Looking for Fael

Fael is missing. He just sent you a weird message asking you to help him find his way out of his apartment, but he doesn’t seem to be there. There are lots of weird devices there, and strange clues. And as you unlock more and more doors, the apartment seems to grow bigger. And pretty soon, you seem to be lost in the apartment too. A weird escape room game taking place in a house that doesn’t obey the laws of nature.

Try the demo: Looking for Fael

Paint Over

An escape room style first person puzzle taking place in an interactive “museum”. You can turn every painting into an interactive window into another world, so you can change the perspective and see the secret number hiding on the side of the normal view. Or you can freeze it during a lightning strike to brighten up the outside room. And later on you gain the ability to alter the paintings by drawing “magic spells” into them. It mixes the traditional escape room puzzles with the need to find clever alterations to the paintings.

Try the demo: Paint Over

Parallel Experiment

A co-op escape room that really nails the co-op aspect. You and your partner are trapped in what looks like the same room, but with minor changes. You will have to communicate all the time, since often you have one half of the puzzle while they have the other half, or you can only change different sides of the same puzzle, or you have the clues for their puzzle while they have yours. While not really scary, this feels like you’re in a Saw movie, being abducted and having to race against time to exit the rooms. The full game goes beyond this prison, since you play two detectives, I expect it to also go into more detective mode with riddles and clues leading to your abductor.

Try the demo: Parallel Experiment

Words, Grids and Logic

And everything else that doesn’t fit in the previous categories.

Birdigo

A deckbuilding word game with roguelike features. Given a few letters, your goal is to find words and gather points. But you only have a few words to use, and the required points along the journey get increasingly out of hand. Journey? Yes, the theme is that you’re a flock of birds flying on a journey, and each point is a flap, and you need 60 flaps to get from one stop to the next. After every successful flight, you can choose one of three upgrades, like one more letter spot in your hand, one more letter in your bag, upgrading letters to be worth more flaps, or score modifiers like “if there are an odd number of letters in your word, add 10 flaps to the score”. Well done game, among the many Balatro-inspired deckbuilders this one has a strong theme and is more educational than just gambling.

Try the demo: Birdigo

Cadence

A unique game sitting somewhere between pathfinding, programming, graph theory and music making. The goal could be described as sending a wave from a starting point to a target by making jumping balls excite each other. In a rectangular grid almost each cell has a ball on it. When a ball jumps, it excites all its outgoing neighbors. Your goal is to connect the tiles the right way, so that after an initial excitation from the starting point, the balls activate each other in a chain reaction until the target gets excited. Sounds simple, but things get more complicated with unique topologies and fixed connections, tiles that require two or more excitations at different times to activate, tiles that require two excitations at the same time to activate, and I’m sure more interesting mechanics will follow.

Try the demo: Cadence

ChipWits

A remake of a really, really old (40 years) game. You have to write a program that lets a robot pass through a level, collecting goodies, avoiding dangers, zapping baddies. There are different types of levels, some that just require you to write in a basic predetermined sequence of steps, some that require you to write a generic automatic program full of conditions, branches and loops that can run in any level layout, some that require you to gather as many resources as you can without an otherwise fixed goal, and many others. The old concept of the game has been modernized, with plenty of cool features: metrics, leaderboards, open ended solutions, monthly challenges.

Try the demo: ChipWits

CIPHER ZERO

A logic grid game that feels like a cross between Nonogram and Numberlink (and probably more in the full game). I won’t spoil the details since figuring out the rules is part of the game, but if you like logic grid games, do give this one a try. Apart from the puzzles themselves, the game looks and sounds great too.

Try the demo: CIPHER ZERO

Is This Seat Taken?

A lighthearted logic puzzle that puts you in the role of a matchmaker, tasked with arranging groups of people based on their preferences and  peeves. With a variety of you must make deductions to ensure everyone is seated in a way that keeps them happy and content. Cute graphics, and an overarching story that got me curious.

Try the demo: Is This Seat Taken?

Lucky Me

A geometry puzzle game disguised as a shooter. In a room full of gun-toting assassins that all copy your moves, you need to find the right position and orientation that lets you be the only survivor when everybody shoots their gun. And things get even more challenging when there’s more than one shot, since not everybody can die during the first turn, you need to find partitions that still allow everybody left standing in the last turn to die.

Try the demo: Lucky Me

NULLPTR

I think this is the longest demo in the showcase, with more than 2 hours needed to solve the 49 levels. It’s a pseudo-hacking game in which you need to travel down paths in a grid to “hack” nodes while avoiding being detected. There are lots of interesting mechanics to discover, with levels requiring multiple passes to gradually unlock elements until you can finally reach the true target, memory nodes holding bits of story. There are many types of levels, some simple pathfinding, many about managing resources, and throughout there’s also a speed and time management aspect since you can only stay out of entry points for 20 seconds at a time.

Try the demo: NULLPTR

Puzzle Spy International

Solve puzzles and riddles to catch criminals and spies. There is only one level in the demo, but the completely unclued way that it's presented makes it really tricky. Figuring out what the list of lists of words means, how to complete the crossword-like grid, and how to obtain the final answer is a very good challenge. There's a spy story as well, with humorous characters and dialog. If you like solving crosswords, logic grids, word puzzles and other games like that, this looks like a good way to put those into a proper game.

Try the demo: Puzzle Spy International

Trifoil

A line drawing game with special mechanics. Unlike the basic OneLine puzzles, here there are different symbols that alter the requirements, like being able to cross two times over the same cell, or being able to cross one and a half times (don’t ask me how), or having a few unplaced symbols that you are free to use wherever you need to. There’s an overworld to navigate as well instead of a simple level selection, with nested worlds and “boss” levels that are harder than the regular ones, and although the main levels are mostly easy tutorial-like levels, there are a few post-credits levels in the demo that are posing a real challenge.

Try the demo: Trifoil

You Are The Code

The entire game consists of lines of code, but you don’t write the code, you just choose which lines to execute. Clever and varied puzzles, but easy enough to understand even for those not used to programming. And it’s not just executing plain code, the code itself is dynamic, with “bugs” eating it away so you must find a quick way to reach a line before it’s gone, and interconnected levels with shared variables, and a few tricky math problems. Lovely!

Try the demo: You Are The Code