Welcome to Puzzle Lovers! - Play Hard. Think Harder.

Welcome once again to our weekly newsletter with puzzle game news, new and upcoming releases, giveaways, deals and bundles, spotlight on a lesser-known or forgotten game, and other stuff.

Greetings to those who’ve joined since last week! If you found us through a link to the newsletter, read the group overview to see what else we can offer, visit the forum for puzzle discussion, follow our curator for reviews and recommendations, join the No Clue Discord server[discord.gg], check out our Basic Functionality and Accessibility Guide on how to improve your games, and tell your friends if you like what you see. Thanks!

Ideally, every group member would follow our curator and vice versa, but until then, here's the changelog. And don't forget our many lists based on themes and subgenres.

• Avalon Jewels (match 3)
  
• Chivalry Quest: Sword and Flame CE (hidden object)

• ℹ️ HAMSTERMIND (strategy, logic)
  
• ℹ️ Summer Adventurers: Mediterranean (hidden object)
  
• ZERO_FILL (logic)

The giveaways are on SteamGifts, but no need to create an account, just visit the site and log in through Steam. Good luck!

• La Mystérieuse Résidence (escape room, point&click, free): An escape room game. It’s free, but it’s only available in French, uses AI-generated graphics, and the puzzles don’t look that interesting.
  
  
• Hexa Merge (merge3): A merge game on hexagonal grids. AI-generated graphs are too abstract to make intuitive sense, but at least you can see the actual value when hovering over a tile.
  
  
• Wriggle Apple (pathfinding): A game “inspired” by Snakebirds (if not an outright clone), though with only one worm to control. Navigate tight levels, eat apples to grow, and try not to fall off the level or onto spikes. There’s another one coming in a few days, and a third one a little bit later.

• 👍 Beware of the Cartographer! (orientation, point&click, adventure, mystery): A point&click game in which you must survey a place and draw an accurate map of it. While that is the end goal, it’s not just that; the bulk of the game is actually an adventure. You have to talk to a lot of characters, not just humans but also animals and even statues, and convince them to help you. There’s also the mystery of why the place refuses to be mapped, with all of your predecessors having disappeared, never to be seen again. So, it’s a point-and-click adventure with lots of dialogue and a cartography simulator with actual tools to use. It’s lovely! (my playthrough)
  
  
• 👍 Caterpillar King (turn-based strategy, pathfinding): Use bugs with different abilities to help feed the caterpillar. There are various bugs on a grid—some that you control and some that the computer controls. The main bug is the baby caterpillar, which just wants to eat leaves. You also control a bug that can swap places with another object, and one that can push objects. One enemy bug tries to hurt the caterpillar, and another wants to eat leaves as well. Your goal is to protect the caterpillar and help it eat the leaves before the other bugs do. It’s promising, but the demo is too short, with only a handful of easy levels. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 😐 DungeonSweeper (minesweeper, logic, strategy): An advanced minesweeper in which each “mine” is a different powerful creature. You don’t just safely flag the mines; you actually have to battle all the creatures, losing as many hearts as the enemy’s strength. So you have to figure out not just where the enemies are, but what kind of enemy is under each tile, defeat enough enemies to gain enough experience to level up while staying alive, and strengthen your character all the way to the powerful dragon. Plus, some of the characters have some other special properties, like the lovers who are always facing each other, or the minotaur that’s guarding a chest. This is actually an excellent game on itch.io, DragonSweeper[danielben.itch.io], and I’m not sure if this DungeonSweeper (or the other, almost identical but different Dungeon Sweeper game) is an authorized copy or just an IP theft. Plus, the game’s art is AI-generated. I’d rather play the free version on itch.(my playthrough)
  
  
• 👍 Gambonanza (chess-like, roguelike): A very roguelike chess game with plenty of power-ups. You must survive a long run of chess battles, with the same “hand” of pieces going from round to round, so better keep your pieces safe. You start with 3 random pieces, and after each successful round, you can purchase more pieces, abilities, or single-use tokens. There is a lot of variety in these abilities, from basic “random chance to gain coins”, to complicated rules like “capturing a piece with no neighbors with a rook skips the enemy’s turn”. But the enemy can also have special abilities, and the boards are full of effects. It’s not just simple chess, you have to decide if it’s worth it to attack a piece if it means your piece will also fall through the board, which pieces to put into the game from the start, when to add pieces (yes, you can add pieces mid-game), when to spend coins, how to position your pieces at the start… As hard as vanilla chess is, this makes it infinitely more complicated. Overall, I think it’s a good roguelike inspired by chess, though it is too different to be called chess. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 😐 Goob Wants an Android Girlfriend (logic): Given a grid with laser sources, laser targets, and mirrors, you must move the mirrors so that all the lasers hit their targets. But you don’t move one mirror at a time; you shift an entire row or column with all the mirrors on them, wrapping around the edges. There may also be more than one grid, with the columns or rows linked, so you shift a column in each of the grids. And there’s a move limit; you must find the optimal solution. I like the idea of the game, but I dislike the atmosphere. The story is that you’re a little dumb robot who is fixing female-looking robots so that they agree to be his girlfriends, with borderline NSFW graphics and very cringey text. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 😐 Lost in Art: a Miniature Realm (point&click, art, minigames): A game set in old paintings of the Ottoman and Persian empires. You wake up trapped in an old illustrated book, and to get out, you must fix everything wrong. Unscramble the calendar, put the correct characters in a painting, label the classes of people… Each activity is based on real art, accompanied by a short educational text. It’s rather simple, but fine if you’re mainly interested in learning about the Ottoman Empire. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 👍 orrb (light redirecting, knowledge discovery): Build circuits to guide an orb of light across levels. Place down tiles with bumpers, teleporters, buttons, and other mechanics to guide the orb to the other side of the screen, collecting all the other lights along the way. There’s a more complicated goal of figuring out which symbols need to be placed down in the last part of the game, and instead of solving it one screen at a time, you need to solve a chain of levels all at once. I think there are some hidden mechanics I missed, since apparently I didn’t clear 100% of the demo. I like the main idea of the game, but some aspects could be optimized. The game has very low contrast; everything is a mid-gray, which makes it hard to see. Some of the levels seem too big and chaotic. And the fact that I need to solve 7 levels at once means that if I have a mistake in the last level, I have to keep watching the orb slowly go through the first 6 levels over and over again while I debug the last level… Still, the full game trailer promises a lot more interesting mechanics. I’m really looking forward to it. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 😐 Orso (pathfinding, perspective illusions): One of those games where you can change the perspective so that when two tiles look like they’re touching, you can move between them. The goal is to help a bunny reach a carrot, hopping from tile to tile and rotating the world to create new apparent connections between otherwise unconnected places. But unlike most other games with this idea, Orso feels off. The bunny often jumps over visible gaps. It’s frequently hidden behind other blocks, only to reappear if you rotate the world a few times. There are paired portals, but there is no indication of the other exit. The difficulty jumps from trivial to hard with nothing in between. The level selection is broken. It’s a nice concept, but it needs more work.
  (my playthrough)
  
  
• 👍 Paklyx (pathfinding, math): On a grid with some numbers on it, the goal is to reach every number when it’s exactly 0. Every step you take decrements all the numbers by 1. When a number reaches 0, it turns into a key. Step on a number too early or too late, and you will lose the level. It’s simple at first, but it gets challenging when more mechanics are added: numbers you can reset, numbers you can pause, and more in the full game. I like this type of game; I only wish there was an option to undo. (my playthrough)
  
  
• ☹️ Rites & Receipts (job simulator, attention to details): Perform the correct ritual—but only when the request is legitimate. You’re essentially an office worker, except the “office” belongs to the Dark Magic Federation, and your job is to carry out magical rituals. Each request arrives as a receipt from the front desk, containing two symbols and a short description, for example: “My arm is wrong, fix it.” Using these, you consult the ritual handbook to identify the two ingredients you need. At least in the demo, this is straightforward: there are only four ingredients, the symbols always point directly to the correct ones, and the text simply helps confirm that you’re performing the right ritual. Things become more complex once fake requests start appearing, and certain rituals also require the correct stamp. I expect the full game will introduce more rules over time. But based on what’s shown in the demo, it’s a bit underwhelming—mostly just paying attention to details and following a few simple steps.
  (my playthrough)
  
  
• 😐 Welcome To Mars 9 (point&click adventure, mystery): An adventure game in space. You find yourself saved by a wandering ship, one dedicated to relaxation. You’re free to do anything you want, but someone tries to kill you. It’s a standard story-rich point&click adventure, with a lot of dialog and only a few rather simple puzzles, but what bothers me the most is a kind of time pressure, being in space you need to regularly recover from being radiated by visiting a healing chamber. (my playthrough)

If you have your own puzzler, adventure, demo, or some new content coming out on mobile or PC? Let us know in the forum or by adding sdumitriu on Steam Chat.

• AVaOut (adventure)
  
• Steam Revolution: The Age of Rail (train sim)
  
• words from pluto... (platformer)

• Deponia (adventure)

Highlighting a short and free puzzle game every week!

Highlighting another free puzzle game every week!

You can always check our curator for curated titles on sale. Specials on the front page is incomplete; click the Discounts tab for more.

Show the world how good (or bad) you are at puzzle games by submitting your Workshop levels, guides, walkthroughs, mods, artwork inspired by a puzzler, or whatever, even if it's not a game curated by us, in this forum thread or below in the comments to be featured here next time.

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