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fez_machine posted:Here's what the sole negative review says: Not every game has to be Stephen's Sausage Roll or Snakebird that destroys you within the first few levels. With that said, Parabox does encourage me to go back and wrack my brains over the harder games. I still have that one final level of Cosmic Express to clear... Blattdorf fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Apr 3, 2022 |
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Apr 3, 2022 20:36
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fez_machine posted:I disagree with the assessment on the puzzle design but the game makes it very possible to see all of its mainline content and gimmicks Yeah I've found the mainline progression puzzles in Patrick's Parabox honestly a little easier than I'd like -- "your first solution is usually the correct one" is pretty spot on in my experience. For what it's worth I'm no puzzle genius, especially for block-pushing stuff -- I found Baba is You and especially Stephen's Sausage Roll to be really challenging
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Apr 3, 2022 21:03
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goferchan posted:Yeah I've found the mainline progression puzzles in Patrick's Parabox honestly a little easier than I'd like -- "your first solution is usually the correct one" is pretty spot on in my experience. For what it's worth I'm no puzzle genius, especially for block-pushing stuff -- I found Baba is You and especially Stephen's Sausage Roll to be really challenging Kind of felt the same way for the most part, but the lighter difficulty was offset by how clever I found the concepts. The "a-ha" moments still feel really good because the mechanics are just fun to play with and the design is pretty brilliant. There were only a few that really stumped me, but even if I had to look anything up, I'd just see the first move and be able to figure out the rest on my own. I thought the difficulty hit a pretty hard wall with Infinite Enter though. Most of the main track ones were fine, and I got the basic concepts of forcing a recursive error, but it felt harder to grasp the ones where there's already an error block because it never teaches you how to use it. There's one where you have to make the exit block appear in the error block, but it just sort of shows up there when you do something seemingly unrelated, so I had no idea WHY the solution worked. I still enjoyed it, but that was the stage where I would stop and come back later the most.
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Apr 12, 2022 03:05
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Bonk posted:Kind of felt the same way for the most part, but the lighter difficulty was offset by how clever I found the concepts. The "a-ha" moments still feel really good because the mechanics are just fun to play with and the design is pretty brilliant. There were only a few that really stumped me, but even if I had to look anything up, I'd just see the first move and be able to figure out the rest on my own. Yeah, that first infinite enter puzzle relies on setting up a puzzle where it's really easy to accidentally stumble into the infinitesimal block, and the player taking away from it that sometimes the infinitesimal block can have stuff in it. One thing that did disappoint me about Parabox was the lack of a meta-puzzle like Baba's endgame had. It felt like there was lots of scope there for a reveal that the menu screen itself had a puzzle that I hadn't figured out yet and I was kind of sad that the game just ended instead.
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Apr 14, 2022 13:51
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Puzzle game sale on Steam this weekend. https://store.steampowered.com/sale/CerebralPuzzleShowcase
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May 20, 2022 17:20
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Superrodan posted:Quern: Undying Thoughts is probably the most "modern" Myst-like. It feels like a Myst game but with an inventory and a lot of the design considerations of more friendly modern game design. It's mostly linear, where the puzzles all typically give you a good idea of one or two places to look into next, but it's not entirely hand holdy. I generally I had a LOT of fun following its path and figuring out how the world works. As a small warning, there are a LOT of puzzles in the game. This means that a few of them are mildly derivative of other puzzle types you've seen before... but almost all of the puzzles in the game offer some kind of small twist on their formula. I honestly think this is one of the better puzzle games I've played in the last few years and it's a shame that I don't see it mentioned often outside of people looking at Myst games. So Quern, yeah, pick it up. Good puzzlin'. https://store.steampowered.com/app/512790/Quern__Undying_Thoughts/
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Jun 14, 2022 15:23
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Witness parody The Looker is a game I cannot recommend enough, as someone who loved the witness and can no longer recommend it because Blow is Blow: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985690/The_Looker/ Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Jun 22, 2022 |
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Jun 22, 2022 16:49
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Discendo Vox posted:Witness parody The Looker is now out:  v
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Jun 22, 2022 16:51
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Yeah, The Looker was one of the few games I've played recently to make me genuinely belly-laugh, and it does a really good job of making its puzzles simeltaneously jokes and puzzles.
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Jun 22, 2022 18:11
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This game is $2 on the summer Steam sale, and it's quite charming: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1152580/Ann_Achronist_Many_Happy_Returns/ but mostly I would like someone else to buy it because I'm stuck and since almost no one has played it I can't find any hints  Essentially, it's a time travel visual novel. You keep reliving the same day in the past to see your future life improve. It's got Majora's Mask-like schedules and multiple "lives" that give you different powers. edit: lmao nevermind I figured out what I was missing but for real! Cute game. Not very hard puzzle-wise but sometimes you just want a pleasant ride for $2 Hawkperson fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Jun 28, 2022 |
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Jun 28, 2022 06:28
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Hawkperson posted:This game is $2 on the summer Steam sale, and it's quite charming: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1152580/Ann_Achronist_Many_Happy_Returns/ but mostly I would like someone else to buy it because I'm stuck and since almost no one has played it I can't find any hints There's one blind video LP out there that I had to follow along with a couple times.
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Jun 28, 2022 13:51
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I have a horrible wonderful idea for a Goon Project. Escape Simulator has a room generation engine, and it's gotten increasingly sophisticated and feature-complete over the period since release. At this point the tool is reportedly relatively easy to work with. Recently a Mega Collaboration room was released for the game, starring 12 separate mini-rooms made by 12 separate mappers. I've played through it, and I'll be blunt- I feel like goons could do better (especially that one "chess" room, yikes). Is there any interest in participating in such a collaboration here?
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Jul 26, 2022 05:15
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It's a great time to be a puzzle game player! The biggest news is Zachtronics' final release, Last Call BBS. It's a grouping of eight games, mostly Zach-esque designs alongside a couple of oddball selections. To call it a minigame collection is doing it a disservice, as a few of these games would be worthy as standalone titles. Programming? It's in the game. Circuit design? Yep. Solitaire? You betcha. Next up is Escape Academy, a nice addition to a growing library of escape room style games. It supports two-player co-op play, and you can see each others' screens at all times, allowing you to easily swap information with your partner. The difficulty level is generally appropriate for a "family-friendly escape room" setting, with a few clever puzzles but nothing that will burn the brains of experienced gamers. The game is a bit short; there are about a dozen rooms included, each taking 20-35 minutes to complete. The $20 price tag seems more than fair, and even better, the title is currently included in Game Pass for PC! I will go to my grave insisting that Into the Breach is as much a puzzle game as a tactics game. The developer just released the free Advanced Edition update, which adds new mech squads, mission types, weapons, and more. ITB is already one of my all-time favorite turn-based games. If you haven't played it, now's a great time to try it out. The mobile version is free if you have Netflix. Yeah, weird crossover, but you can't beat free. Alan's Automation Workshop is one of the first non-Zachtronics Zach-likes that really engaged me. It's a programming and sequence puzzle game where you design flowcharts to automate machines and robots to perform specific tasks. I'm not very far into this yet, but it's a good time so far. Finally, I've gotten back into Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, everyone's favorite/most-hated co-op bomb defusing game. The standard modules built into the game got stale years ago, but there's a vibrant modding community for KTANE that has added dozens of devious new modules, and starting down that path has breathed new life into this classic. If you want to dive in, I recommend going out to the Steam Workshop and grabbing the Krow's Intro to Mods Collection, which includes around 90 new modules, along with a structured set of bombs that will ease you into the new modules just a few at a time, escalating in difficulty from very easy to "oh gently caress off".
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Jul 28, 2022 12:02
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I found a cool little Zach-adjacent puzzle game: CHR$(143) It's a physics-based puzzle game where you interact with logic circuits to navigate and ultimately escape the level. Kinda feels like Boulder Dash/Supaplex with an additional twist, at least the early levels. I've only finished the tutorial in the demo, but it looks like later on you actually gain the ability to build your own machinery, so it could become a lot more interesting. There's also a tileset mode, if you're put off by the 8-bit aesthetic.
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Aug 14, 2022 20:28
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Kinda surprised nobody in this thread has mentioned Infinite Turtles yet. It starts out looking like a pretty standard Zach-like game where you send number tokens around a grid with conveyor belts and manipulators, in order to perform specific tasks. But then you realize that every level you complete becomes a component that you can insert into a tile in future levels. And once you're past a certain point in the game, you can take the component you're currently editing and insert it straight into the same level to make recursive components. It's clearly targeted at programmers and the UI is somewhat clunky, but the puzzle design is great and the creator has clearly thought through all the test scenarios for each level. And if you're an optimizer, you get to have the fun of figuring out if your solution's design is slow in its own design, or slow in one of the sub-components you finished 20 levels ago 
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Aug 14, 2022 21:00
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TheOneAndOnlyT posted:Kinda surprised nobody in this thread has mentioned Infinite Turtles yet. It starts out looking like a pretty standard Zach-like game where you send number tokens around a grid with conveyor belts and manipulators, in order to perform specific tasks. But then you realize that every level you complete becomes a component that you can insert into a tile in future levels. And once you're past a certain point in the game, you can take the component you're currently editing and insert it straight into the same level to make recursive components. Yeah, it's good! I finished all the puzzles (and some custom ones) a week ago or so, spent a good amount of time on it and had quite a lot of fun with it. Highly recommended, and try to get trough the first ~15 levels asap imo to unlock all the tools, and then go back to optimize earlier levels (if you want).
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Aug 14, 2022 21:39
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I look at that automation workshop game all the time but the reviews are a bit dodgy and it puts me off. Is it good actually?
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Aug 15, 2022 00:12
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grate deceiver posted:I found a cool little Zach-adjacent puzzle game: CHR$(143) I can only encourage you to continue: level 22 is a good step to get a broader view of the game... 
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Aug 15, 2022 14:01
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grate deceiver posted:I found a cool little Zach-adjacent puzzle game: CHR$(143) I'm not great at zachtronics/heavy logic stuff but I'm really loving the demo so far (L007). Even if it gets way too hard for me eventually I feel like I've already had $4 worth of fun
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Aug 15, 2022 16:26
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grate deceiver posted:I found a cool little Zach-adjacent puzzle game: CHR$(143) This looks nuts, thanks for the heads up
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Aug 16, 2022 17:02
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The ASCII aesthetic caused me to remember the ancient Super Serif Brothers, and from there I found out Netshift/Blackshift is finally out on Steam.
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Aug 18, 2022 14:18
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Having played it up to level 25 of CHR$(143), it definitely gets a lot weirder fast, with hints of more weirdness to come, such as the implication in multiple places that you get programmable CPUs later, and enemy players? Zachlike Supaplex may or may not end up being an accurate shorthand. You do have to be prepared to fiddle with some involved controls and very strange (but somewhat predictable) physics though. Especially in a game with no undo or savestates and a limited blueprint system. I had the most trouble so far with the levels where you have to power a turbo generator. The game has built in hints but for these levels the hints just pointed out the basic functionality of the parts involved, which didn't help in understanding why my layout generates 5 times less power than needed. njean posted:I can only encourage you to continue: level 22 is a good step to get a broader view of the game... I'm fairly sure this is the author of the game. Level 22 is a little adventure where you have to explore a map with fog of war; block, disable and take over a runaway drill and then create an armed submarine.
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Aug 19, 2022 15:47
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njean posted:I can only encourage you to continue: level 22 is a good step to get a broader view of the game... Lol welcome to the forums. This is an extremely neat little game, I haven't made it to 22 just yet though
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Aug 19, 2022 21:29
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KNR posted:Zachlike Supaplex may or may not end up being an accurate shorthand.
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Aug 20, 2022 12:32
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dirby posted:Supaplex as a shorthand for "Boulder Dash clone"? (My first was Heartlight PC.) Or does Supaplex have a specific take that CHR$(143) matches? Just Boulder Dash clone, though getting up to level 43, that seems to be less the case as the game has been focusing more on its fluid physics and logic gates. At this point it does have the issue that more than halfway through the levelset it still seems more focused on tutorializing new mechanics and interactions than on applying them to interesting challenges. With the levels being of pretty much unbounded size/complexity, halfway through by level number might be very far from halfway by playtime, though. And it has already been worth the very low price.
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Aug 20, 2022 13:27
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goferchan posted:Lol welcome to the forums. This is an extremely neat little game, I haven't reached level 22 yet. Thanks, you're very kind and it's always a pleasure to meet new players. I hope you will reach level 22... and beyond ;^) Note that solving level 28 gives you access to the Workshop levels too...
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Aug 21, 2022 18:56
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Manufactoria 2022 left early access last week and probably deserves a mention in this thread. I played the hell out of the original in... 2009? And the new one is just as good.
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Aug 21, 2022 19:06
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I've always enjoyed substitution ciphers whenever some game would use one as a puzzle, so I jumped on Prose & Codes. It's nothing but four hundred or so different enciphered paragraphs to uncode, wrapped in some pretty graphic design and soothing piano music, and I love it.  There is a free demo with 30 (I think) free puzzles to beat. Don't be a baby, play on hard, it's still pretty easy.
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Aug 31, 2022 17:48
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1967510/Railbound/ https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/256904460/movie480_vp9.webm?t=1662449082 Good puzzle game. And don't let the cutesy graphics fool you it can be genuinely challenging. And it's a type of puzzle I haven't seen all that much of recently. I recommend checking it out for some puzzly goodness Megazver posted:I've always enjoyed substitution ciphers whenever some game would use one as a puzzle, so I jumped on Prose & Codes. It's nothing but four hundred or so different enciphered paragraphs to uncode, wrapped in some pretty graphic design and soothing piano music, and I love it. Yeah I really like this one too, it's fun and something you don't see that often.
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Sep 19, 2022 01:57
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murklins posted:I really liked Bean and Nothingness and wish it was getting more attention. It's as good as baba and sausage roll imo.
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Sep 19, 2022 03:40
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Taiji is out. It's basically The Witness 2-d. If you liked The Witness you'll probably like this game. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1141580/Taiji/
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Sep 19, 2022 07:01
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Superrodan posted:Taiji is out. It's basically The Witness 2-d. If you liked The Witness you'll probably like this game. It’s pretty fun for a few hours but the mechanics you learn generally aren’t as interesting as those in the Witness. Some are extremely close so you may feel like you’ve done them before. For me the hardest puzzles weren’t about knowing the rules, it was down to trial and error to get a setup that validated them all.
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Sep 19, 2022 13:03
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Evil Trout posted:It’s pretty fun for a few hours but the mechanics you learn generally aren’t as interesting as those in the Witness. Some are extremely close so you may feel like you’ve done them before. It also does a thing that The Witness by and large does not do which is teach you a set of rules and then suddenly reveal it taught you wrong, which can be a very frustrating experience.
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Sep 19, 2022 21:06
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TBH I might be misunderstanding what you mean by “teaching you wrong” and I haven’t played Taiji but: the witness does do some intentionally misleading tutorialization. Like leading you to believe a rule works like X until a new puzzle makes you understand you had never realized nuance Y - when done well it’s almost funny, like a pun in rules space. I’m curious about how Taiji does it and what makes it frustrating.
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Sep 19, 2022 21:25
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giogadi posted:TBH I might be misunderstanding what you mean by “teaching you wrong” and I haven’t played Taiji but: the witness does do some intentionally misleading tutorialization. Like leading you to believe a rule works like X until a new puzzle makes you understand you had never realized nuance Y - when done well it’s almost funny, like a pun in rules space. I’m curious about how Taiji does it and what makes it frustrating. It's basically that but more clumsy and for most of the puzzle types. It's a fairly common experience from what I've read about Taiji to get deep into a puzzle set and realise you have no idea what the rules actually are.
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Sep 19, 2022 21:30
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fez_machine posted:It's basically that but more clumsy and for most of the puzzle types. It's a fairly common experience from what I've read about Taiji to get deep into a puzzle set and realise you have no idea what the rules actually are. There have definitely been a few puzzles I felt were... logical leaps. Mostly they try to give you one weird puzzle as a twist and I'm not sure I like that element of the design. Plus there was one puzzle I had to look up because I'm not happy with the style of puzzle. It's just the exact opposite of my style, felt incredibly tedious, and I felt no harm in just looking up an answer to skip it. Generally, however, I sincerely feel like the mandatory puzzles in this game with maybe two exceptions are on the same level, if not mostly easier than the hardest ones in the witness. if you liked The Witness I would imagine 98% of the "required to beat the game" puzzles will work for you. There have been some optional puzzles that are very, very difficult, however. I know the rules, but it just seems somewhat tedious to have to sit there and try to figure out a promising way to start solving it.
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Sep 19, 2022 22:00
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I'm real bad at Taiji but I'm trying to be cool and not look for answers yet
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Sep 20, 2022 02:01
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Hawkperson posted:I'm real bad at Taiji but I'm trying to be cool and not look for answers yet I enjoy giving hints, so if you want to DM me for mild mild pushes in the right direction I can help.
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Sep 20, 2022 02:28
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WhiteHowler posted:
Agree both that it's both a puzzle game and extremely good. It's incredibly satisfying to play, you're faced with a quick succession of mini puzzles almost all having high stakes for your run, and you feel like a genius when you figure out the sequence of moves that will get you past that turn cleanly.
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Sep 21, 2022 12:58
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murklins posted:I really liked Bean and Nothingness and wish it was getting more attention. It's as good as baba and sausage roll imo. It's a fun but really tough game. Eventually I just lost interest, because I got stuck to much, but didn't really feel like giving up either...
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Sep 21, 2022 20:50
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