https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
It's an open source collection of puzzle games that has been ported to Android, Mac, PC, Linux, probably others. You can play the games on the web at the link above too.
Simon curated, rather than invented, these games. None of them are particularly remarkable. There's many old classics like Blackbox and Sudoku (Solo). I recognize about half of them from playing somewhere else before. The strength is having them all in one collection, particularly on my phone, which makes them perfect for a variety of situations - sipping on my morning coffee, double-screening on the couch, etc. And this is free, open-source software, devoid of ads, freemium nonsense, or all the nasty brainhacks that push you to play. If you are addicted to these games, it is on their own appeal.
Each game is cosmetically minimal - no animations or flash. Most of the games are deductive in nature, asking you to use logic to winnow down the possibilities to a single solution. There are extra "
tools"
in the interface to help with deduction, e.g. "
locking"
a state to show it as solved, adding notations that describe possibilities. These tools feel elegantly designed to be just what you need - not much more or less. I've had some moments where I wished for a Kaser-style "
what if"
feature to explore hypotheticals. But then I wondered how much of a crutch that would be, preventing me from good rule-making.
"
Rule-making"
- What I call my process of making general rules to solve puzzle types. It is a good thing to solve one puzzle. It is a better thing to make a new rule. For example, on the "
Towers"
puzzle, I made a general rule for myself that an edge tile of "
3"
will always begin with a possibility of that tile containing "
1"
, "
2"
, or "
3"
. A puzzle is solved with an individual solution. A *game* is solved when you've made enough rules that finding solutions are just applying those rules in an effortless way.
While these games are not an epic experience, they are a nice complement to my life giving me calm fun and occasionally insights about how I think that I can apply to other things.
-Erik
____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals |
twitch stream |
youtube archive (NSFW)
