The team is always hard at work expanding the range of games covered by our big Thinky Games Database: this time around we've got a whole bunch of new entries in the area of paper puzzles that don't tell you how you're supposed to solve them.
Rule-discovery is a lovely area of puzzle games where even the scope of "what is the objective here and how do I achieve it?" is part of the game: you'll have to figure it all out by playing and observing lots of little context clues. If you've never played something like that before it might sound confusing or even impossible, but the best designers can guide a player in very subtle ways towards creating their own realizations.
If you follow the site and our news coverage, you've no doubt heard about LOK and its sister games by now, but if you haven't: the puzzle books from Slovenian creator Blaž Urban Gracar are some of the modern classics of this genre of cryptic puzzles that don't explain themselves. The lovely process of expanding your own understanding as you play through them has made them audience favorites, and other similar games like CERT and 12 Word Searches (and the fascinating, recently released 0PLAYER) have also been in the database for some time.
This week a whole host of new rule-discovery puzzles were added to the site, most of them taking the form of small, paper-puzzle style experiences, just without the typical initial text introductions. Many of them present you with puzzle visuals and... hope for you to take it from there and figure out what you're meant to be doing. Others might give partial instructions or obscure part of the information. The recent additions are:
- Witless - A Puzzling Journey
- Tunnels
- The Temple of Blight
- Letter Coins
- House
- Lyth
- Draw a Loop!
- Counterfill
- Coconuts
- FMTC
Many of these games come in PDF form, so the easiest way to play them tends to be using an image-editing software that allows you to draw on the puzzles and take notes. Personally I recommend Paint.NET, it's totally free and has never let me down. (That being said, it also sounds very fun to print out of a bunch of these games and have a little folder of analogue puzzling to take anywhere.)
Go dig around and discover some new games, and have fun being confused. Embrace it!
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