Tres Undos

Tres Undos is a block-pushing puzzle game about a little adventurer plugging up pits with strange grinning totems. In it, the “undo” functionality that’s a standard feature in most block-pushing puzzle games gets a challenging time-bending twist. The levels start out simple enough, but quickly become intense brain-burners despite their diminutive size, each of them initially appearing impossible until you’re able to wrap your head just a little more around the game’s mechanics.

All you need to do to beat each level of Tres Undos is to reach the exit, which is generally blocked by a pit. Luckily, there are totems lying around that you can push into the pits to fill them. However, the game immediately throws a crucial wrinkle into these simple mechanics: certain totems “ignore” the undo button. Pressing Z will undo your movements and un-push any grey blocks that were pushed along the way, but orange blocks will be unaffected and will stay in place. (As a crucial quality of life feature, you can still undo their movements by pressing X to really undo.)

This allows for puzzles that seem simple, but have surprisingly unintuitive, strangely elegant solutions. Not only do you need good spatial reasoning, to succeed, you also need to be able to orient yourself within the often convoluted timeline of the level. Later levels introduce further time-bending twists to the game’s formula. Although the game is short, you can create and share your own levels using the in-game level editor.

This description was written by Asher Stone.