Puzzle Hell

There’s like twenty games at this point that I’ve played that have almost no traction anywhere but that have nevertheless left an indelible mark on my brain. About half of these are unrecommendable for various reasons. We stay silly regardless.

Puzzlers

Lingo

Developer: Brenton Wildes
Genre: nonEuclidean walking simulator + linguistic puzzler
Scope: Long; ~20-30 hours to beat ($10 on steam)
Recommendability: Lovely word puzzles superglued to the least intuitive map layout known to mankind

SquishCraft

Developer: bcat112a
Genre: sokoban, with an absurd twist
Scope: Medium-length; TTB varies, but ~10h ($7 on steam)
Recommendability: How do you expect me to recommend it with graphics like this.

PortalSnake

Developer: bcat112a
Genre: snake “autobattler” featuring perfectly logical portals
Scope: Very short; I beat it in a few hours ($7 on steam)
Recommendability: graphics aside, the game mechanics start at “bizarre” and escalate to “catastrophic brainfuck”

Fractal Factory

Developer: bcat112a
Genre: factory/zachlike with explicitly recursive worldmaps
Scope: Medium; I’m definitively stuck (free!)
Recommendability: insanely satisfying for people who have more screws loose than the average person

Recursed

Developer: Portponky
Genre: puzzle/platformer with recursive room/door semantics
Scope: Medium; ~10h ($8 on steam)
Recommendability: Not especially “weird” but definitely twisty asf

  • YAPP/YAPP2
  • Understand
  • 14 Minesweeper Variants
  • Paquerette Down the Bunburrows
  • I Wanna Lockpick
  • Library of Ruina

Platformers