Two games that are brand new to Steam have been brought to my attention recently, each looking like they have some promising puzzling potential, and each arriving without much fanfare. The first is out now, with the other launching soon and featuring a free demo. Are these potentially future "hidden gems"? Only time will tell. Or maybe you can tell me, once you've tried them out.
First up is PETS, which released this week, and tasks you with chasing and rescuing your dog who's constantly running into labyrinths for tasty treats. The game features a minimal hand-drawn black-and-white art style, aiming for something elegant rather than flashy. The central mechanic here is solving puzzles by swapping between 3D top-down sections and 2D platforming, with the platforms and voids switching around in an eye-catching way.
If this concept sounds familiar, we've seen a pretty similar idea explored in Toodee and Topdee, which was even more explicit about swapping between top-down block-pushing and side-view platforming. But where Toodee featured lots of platforming challenges and big boss fights, I've heard that PETS potentially lands further towards the puzzle end of the spectrum, and goes deeper with the ideas. I haven't yet played myself, to be clear! But I know some veteran puzzle-players are giving it a thumbs up.
Next up is Blobun, combining blobs and bunnies, two well-established subgenres in the puzzle-game space. You are a stretchy slime that prefers to take the shape of a bunny, snaking your body across puzzle levels to visit every square and successfully consume the whole stage. Lots of cute mechanisms are getting in your way and making this task trickier: conveyor belts that pull you along, buttons that swap walls, teleporting tunnel-holes, and it even looks like your blobun can gain a fire-or-ice status.
I'll admit that the cutesy graphics and repetitive music give me that knee-jerk skeptical reaction that Blobun may land in the "cheap casual mobile game" category of puzzles, but I'm tempering that impulse and not dismissing it too quickly, as the number of potentially interesting mechanics on display here look like they could result in a genuinely thinky experience. Not to mention the central visit-every-cell restriction (I believe the mathematical term is a "Hamiltonian path") which brings to mind paper-logic-puzzle style games that I've quite enjoyed.
Blobun is due to release a month from now on March 12, but you can play a demo or wishlist now on the Steam page, and PETS is already available on Steam. I don't know if either of these will prove to be the next big puzzle hit everyone's talking about, but they felt like highlighting to me, in a crowded videogame landscape where it's hard to make a splash. If you play one of them, come let us know in our discord if they're any good!
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