Early on in Big Walk, as you and your pals are scurrying around the world solving puzzles, you might come across a curious sight: a structure near the beach with an oblong prize (here at PC Gamer we call it a nubbin) inside a frosted glass container. Hanging on a hook above it: a sign with some numbers on it. Curious!

You've probably already seen a nubbin in a similar container, which could only be accessed when one of your companions held down a button in a nearby location. But what do these two four-digit numbers mean? And where's the button?

If you're stumped with this numbers puzzle, as we were for a while, we're happy to help.

Since Big Walk is best when you figure puzzles with your friends instead of by reading guides, I'll ease you into the solution to this number puzzle by giving you progressively more explicit hints below. This way you can get some help without completely spoiling the solution, if you like.

Hints

Hint 1:

When you first find this number puzzle, most likely just after you've completed the tutorial puzzles, you won't be able to solve it. It's just that simple. The best advice is to leave it for now and come back to it later, after you've solved five other puzzles and completed the red tower.

Hint 2:

When you're looking around the rest of the world, keep those numbers in mind. Specifically, the format: two four-digit numbers. Maybe you'll see something elsewhere that looks like it's related.

Hint 3:

You'll need a specific item to make sense of those numbers. There are actually two different items that can be individually used to help you with the number puzzle.

Hint 4:

The numbers 4166 and 1899 are coordinates, latitude and longitude, and they point to the button's location on the island.

Hint 5:

There's a map that can be used to find the coordinates, and there's a device that displays its current coordinates on a screen, like a GPS. Either of those can be used to solve the number puzzle.

OK, that's enough hints. Here's the solution:

Solution

First, you can find the map, which requires placing five nubbins on the red tower's roof. The map room will then open up right next to the starting hub, which features a large map on the floor, and a portable, foldable map and compass.

With the map opened in your hands, you can follow the longitude (the numbered lines on the sides) of 41 and the latitude (the numbered lines on the top and bottom) of 18. Where they meet on the map is the grid square to search for the button, which is east and south of the starter hub. The "66" in 4166 refers to a more exact measurement than the map shows, meaning it's about two-thirds of the way south from the top of the grid, and 99 means it's about as far east as you can be in the grid, right along the gridline.

Enlarge the image below by clicking on the arrows on the lower-left corner, if it helps.

That's where to look! You'll find a small button carefully camouflaged behind a rock. Someone will have to hold down the button while another player grabs the nubbin at that puzzle building when the glass container opens, so make sure you've got walkie-talkies with you.

The other way to find the button (and the more fun way, in my opinion) is by using the GPS device. This item will take longer to find than the map: you'll need to visit the green tower, which is in the same area you'll eventually find the button, and just outside it you'll see a red frame holding the GPS (and another sign with more numbers on it).

You can hold the GPS up to friends to show current coordinates, or stick it on someone's backpack.

With one player wearing the GPS on their back, another player can direct them which way to go. Just keep your eyes on the numbers: as you move across the island, the GPS readout will tell you if you're getting closer or further from the location of the button. Happy walking!

Fantastic new puzzle game Big Walk drew some early complaints over the volume of its proximity voice chat, which was too quiet for some players and mic setups, and developer House House has now released a patch that it hopes will resolve the issue while respecting the spirit of the game.

The studio has a fine line to walk, because Big Walk's primary source of friction is the challenge of communicating over distances. Voices don't carry very far, so players often have to communicate with radios, arm signals (or frantic arm waving), notes, and signs to coordinate exploration and solve puzzles.

House House says that, with the new patch, Big Walk "now does a much better job of bringing players with quiet microphone setups up to the intended volume." The change does not, however, increase the distance that voices carry or introduce the option to adjust the voice and background audio levels separately.

"This change makes quiet voices louder overall, so you will be louder up close, and louder at a medium distance," writes the studio. "If you were affected by the issue, you'll probably find talking at a medium distance much more comfortable now.

"However we have not changed the distance at which voices drop off. We consider it an important part of the game's design that you can only hear players who are close to you. This distance is quite specific and shapes the dynamics of the game, the same way that a character's jump height might be very specific in a platforming game."

The developer may consider future changes if feedback warrants it, but says it considers today's patch the "single most important fix regarding voice volume," and will take its time determining whether to pursue further changes.

"We are a very small team, and we want to make sure we get each change right, so we will need to take things one step at a time," the studio said.

We don't have a scored review of Big Walk yet, but will soon—here's Morgan's take on it as of a dozen or so puzzles ago. The short version is that it's a lot of fun.

I haven't encountered issues with the voice volume myself, though it did take me a while to adapt to Big Walk's rapid volume falloff. If you and another player wouldn't be able to hold a casual conversation in real life—say, because you're 25 feet apart on a beach—you probably won't be able to hear each other clearly in Big Walk.

Co-op puzzle game Big Walk launched yesterday, and it's off to a great start: it peaked at nearly 50,000 concurrent players on Steam this morning, Steam reviews are "Very Positive," and here at PC Gamer we're all having a great time with it, too.

There's one issue, however, that shows up in pretty much every negative review on Steam. In a game that strongly suggests you don't use Discord but instead rely on the in-game proximity voice chat for communication… people are having trouble hearing each other.

"Needs different audio sliders, in-game sounds are way too loud, player voices way too quiet," one player wrote in a negative Steam review.

"It's a game about walking and talking, but the voice volume was so quiet that my friend's voices were barely whispers at MAX VOLUME," another said.

"Even standing next to me, all of my friend's mics (who all sound fine in any other game / app) sounded like a whisper," said another.

"Seems like a massive oversight to release a game that is just walking and talking and not include 5 or 6 volume sliders," another reviewer wrote.

These issues are something I noticed when I began playing Big Walk with Morgan and Tyler. That single volume slider can make it hard to hear voice chat while contending with competing sounds in the game, like the sound of the ocean if you're near the beach. In fact, the first thing I did was open my settings to see if I could make the ambient sounds a bit quieter so I could hear my co-op partners more clearly. No dice.

You also have to be in extreme proximity, no more than a few yards apart, to be able to hear your co-op pals (unless you're using walkie-talkies). The sound falls off much faster with distance than in most games, but I assumed this was by design: there are puzzles where you need to find other ways to communicate with your friends who are only a short distance away, and everyone's voices simply being louder would remove some of the creative problem solving that makes the puzzles of Big Walk so much fun.

At any rate, while some players are having issues hearing each other, House House has heard them loud and clear.

"We understand that some people are having a problem where their friends' voices are too quiet in the game. Sorry about this!" House House said in a post on Steam.

"While Big Walk is built around players getting quieter when they are farther away, we can see that for some setups, players' voices are much quieter than intended even when very close by," the developer said.

"We're working to put out a fix as soon as we can."

It's not clear if that means adding multiple volume sliders or just boosting player's voice levels, but we'll find out soon. In the meantime, if you just can't wait for an official patch, there's already a mod on github (note: I haven't tested it myself) that adds a separate voice volume slider to the menu and lets you crank it up to 200%.

The island in co-op walking simulator Big Walk is home to lots of puzzles, and those puzzles can't be completed by a single player. This is a co-op game in the truest sense of the word: you can't get anywhere alone.

Some puzzles involve flipping switches in unison, others require communicating over long distances or through sound-proof glass, some need one player to describe a sequence of symbols only they can see to their teammates, who then have to replicate the sequence somewhere else. Solving a puzzle releases a prize, an object that can be used to explore further into the world and access more puzzles.

But the most vexing puzzle in Big Walk isn't really a puzzle, strictly. It's got a prize: you can see it immediately when you find the puzzle. But to solve it, you don't really have to do anything. And that's what's so devious about it.

PLEASE NOTE: SPOILERS BELOW!!!

This puzzle we came across about six hours into Big Walk doesn't look particularly dastardly. It's just a small room with a door, a couple of windows, a couch and a chair, and a table where the prize sits, waiting to be unlocked.

Hanging on the wall is what appears to be a large digital clock, reading: 00:00.

There are three of us (me, Morgan, and Tyler) and three buttons on the wall. We all press the buttons at the same time and the door to the room shuts, trapping us inside. On the wall, the clock sets itself to 05:00 and begins counting down. It's not a clock. It's a timer.

"We're gonna die. We're all gonna die!" I yell. Morgan feigns panic and begins running around with his hands over his head. But Big Walk isn't a game where things explode or you get dropped into a pit of spikes or the room begins filling up with water. This puzzle is a trap, yes, but it won't kill us.

After looking around for other puzzle elements and finding nothing, we slowly realize the grim truth of what this room wants from us, and it's far worse than spikes or drowning.

"Maybe we should just sit down and watch," Tyler says. "Maybe we just have to wait for five minutes."

OK… fine? We all sit on the couch together. We do nothing. That lasts for 10 whole seconds before Tyler gets restless, stands up, and sits in the chair opposite the couch.

"So, tell me about your feelings," he says. It does feel like a therapy session, in a way. I think that's maybe the point. You're stuck together for five minutes, why not talk to each other about something other than the solution to the next puzzle?

Instead, we all begin looking around the room for something else to do. A mere minute after the timer starts counting down, we decide to try pressing all three buttons together again.

The door doesn't open, but the timer resets to 05:00 again. We simply can't leave until we spend five minutes together in this little room.

"Ah, fuck, fuck," Morgan says.

"Fuck," Tyler agrees. "We just have to wait. And not press anything."

We all sit down again, reluctantly accepting our fates. Here's how the next five minutes goes.

04:45: Morgan discusses his dinner plans.

04:35: Tyler begins flipping the lightswitch in the room on and off. We discuss how he is able to reach the lightswitch while still sitting on the couch because his arm is very stretchy.

04:25: Tyler steals the flashlight I was carrying from my hands and I take it back. I begin impatiently flicking the flashlight on and off. Tyler: "This is what happens when you're forced to just sit for five minutes." Me: "It's the worst puzzle ever."

04:00: Morgan: "Oh my god, only a minute has passed?" I kick the flashlight behind the table. Tyler picks me up over his head.

03:40: I look out the window. Perfectly framed is another nearby building, probably containing a puzzle that is less damaging to our psyches than staying still for a few minutes.

03:30: We've all restlessly changed positions on the couch and chairs again. We've picked each other up and dropped each other several times. Me: "I think this is a test, and we're failing."

03:10: We discuss how each player has a different sitting pose. One of us lounges with an arm resting over the back of the chair. Another stretches their legs out and elegantly crosses their ankles. One of us sits with one foot up. It's cool and ensures we don't all look like identical Big Walkbots. More importantly, it blessedly gives us something to talk about for a few seconds.

02:40: Morgan: "I just had the thought of pressing all the buttons again to see what it does even though I know what it does."

02:15: No one is sitting. The flashlight is being kicked around the room. Morgan is staring at the button next to the door. Morgan: "What about… we could open the door." Tyler: "Don't do it!"

02:00: Me: "Two minutes left? Are you shitting me?" We're milling around, jumping from table to couch to floor, literally bouncing off the walls. Tyler is deliberately trying to kick the flashlight onto the crossbeam of the ceiling. Tyler: "I'm already losing my mind."

01:15: Something wonderfully distracting happens. Morgan kicks the flashlight and it lands on a ledge high up in the corner of the room. We're delighted to have something to do. We stack ourselves three tall to complete the quest we invented ourselves: kill a few agonizing seconds by retrieving the flashlight.

01:00: We all sit on the couch again, defeated, and stare at the timer. Morgan: "I feel like a hyper child. I'm turning 30 this year and I can't sit still for five minutes." Tyler: "Whoa. Big year."

That's about as close to a genuine reflection as we get. Maybe when we pressed the buttons for a second time, the timer should have reset to 10:00. Then we might have had a real breakthrough. Or we would have ragequit. Or more likely, scrolled on our phones for 10 minutes.

00:10: We count down the final 10 seconds along with the timer like it's New Year's Eve. It certainly feels like we have cause to celebrate. Our interminable prison sentence is ending.

00:00: The door opens. The prize is released. The puzzle is solved. We are free to continue not reflecting on the fact that having five minutes of quiet contemplation is akin to torture, and there's probably something wrong with that! Well played, Big Walk. Well played.

I wouldn't be surprised if the devs at House House are a little disappointed that their new co-op puzzle game, Big Walk, will inevitably draw comparisons to "friendslop," the loose genre applied to viral hits like Repo, Lethal Company, and Peak.

Despite its floppy characters and emphasis on proximity chat, Big Walk doesn't have much in common with the biggest friendslop sensations. It has no runs, no quotas, no death—not even a failure state. It doesn't squeeze comedy from capitalist dystopia or traffic in ragolls. House House (known for 2019's Untitled Goose Game) began working on Big Walk before the friendslop explosion, and you can tell.

Instead, Big Walk is a loosely structured open world adventure. You wander around with up to 12 friends (I've been playing in a group of three) solving puzzles, vibing with nature, and grappling with gaps in communication.

It's really good so far—we're six hours into our playthrough with a lot of island left to explore. It's a funny game, but not in the TikTok-friendly "oops my friend fell off the mountain" way. It can be spooky, but not because a monster roams the woods. It can be challenging, but not because the game gets unreasonably brutal when it decides you've survived for too long.

Big Walk is patient, contemplative, and sometimes dull. Not every puzzle we've solved was a winner, and the lack of urgency does mean the occasional lull in stimulation. For those reasons, I wonder if this will land for friend groups who routinely assemble for the latest high-concept, gimmicky job thing. Can Big Walk be a hit without enforced absurdity? Probably not, but thankfully, nobody is insisting it has to be.

I'm glad for that, because Big Walk's memorable moments are rooted in mundanity, like getting lost in the pitch-black night because nobody packed a flashlight, or accidentally kicking our only binoculars off a cliff, or trying to describe a puzzle-relevant drawing from a room away without admitting it looks like a dick and balls.

If Peak is Jenga, fun and repeatable but always the same, Big Walk is a proper campaign—a group project you begin and finish. That once described a lot more co-op games (Portal 2 remains an all-timer), but repeatability has proven far more popular and easy to make. That partially explains why friendslop is already feeling overplayed. As brilliant as those early hits were, Big Walk's freshness shines a light on the copycats in the room.

Devs are speedrunning how many times they can sell the same three disposable activities before interest fades: What if the store you run has monsters? What if you break stuff instead of gently moving stuff? What if you literally just gamble in a casino? Clearly there's still gas in this particular tank—one of the top-wishlisted games on Steam right now is "What if you were flight attendants in a messed up plane?"—but it's also telling that the first breakout indie of 2026, Meccha Chameleon, breaks the friendslop mold with competitive hide-and-seek.

Big Walk deserves similar acclaim. It's out August 4 for… well, I'm not sure how many dollars, but I would happily pay $20 or $25—it's a pretty big game!

I played first-person co-op puzzle game Big Walk with strangers back in March and had an absolute gas. Naturally, it's even better with friends: in two long sessions with my PC Gamer pals Tyler and Morgan, we've solved over a dozen puzzles, had twice as many laughs, and as you might expect, done a heck of a lot of walking.

This isn't a review: after about 6 hours we've conquered a whole mess of puzzles but there's still most of the island left to tackle, and I can't wait to get back in there for more.

After a tutorial consisting of just a few signs on the wall telling us how to use our arms and legs, we set off onto a sprawling island covered in trees, rivers, rocks, and brightly colored puzzle-structures scattered around the landscape. Each puzzle awards a prize I internally call a nubbin (because it doesn't, as far as I know, have a name) and those nubbins have a use I won't specify, but the more of them you collect the deeper into the island you'll begin to explore.

The puzzles, honestly, aren't terrifically hard to figure out so far: the real challenge comes from communication and logistics because no puzzle can be solved alone. At minimum, you need two players, and the puzzles scale up to four: for example, if a puzzle in a two-player session needs both players to hold down buttons at the same time, a four-player session will feature four buttons.

Stray more than a few yards from a pal and you'll have to strain to hear their voice over proximity chat. Another few steps and you won't be able to hear them at all. You can communicate visually by pointing and waving your noodly arms, and there are items you can find and put to use: walkie-talkies, laser pointers, flashlights, even signs you can type messages on.

But those objects all have to be carried in your hands, and you can only carry one thing at a time—at least until you start finding useful accessories like backpacks and holsters. If you take a tumble you'll drop your item, which may bounce away into the woods or down the side of a mountain. Even if you don't drop your item, you'll have to ditch it if you find something else you want to carry.

That's been the real challenge so far: not so much the puzzle solutions but navigating, communicating, and juggling the items we need to bring with us or leave behind. Even when everyone agrees on a course of action, that plan can fall apart by someone tumbling down a hill, getting lost, slipping out of earshot, or to use one specific example, the time Tyler accidentally kicked the binoculars we just found off the top of a tall tower and into the woods below.

Thing is, Big Walk is so chill that little disasters like that are just kinda funny. It's a beautiful, peaceful world, there are no scares or monsters, and no death or fail state. The worst that can happen is someone falls off a ledge or drops an item or gets lost. No problem. We'll take a detour. We'll make do without a walkie-talkie. We'll eventually find each other. There's no need to stress.

My favorite intersection of Big Walk's systems was when we were working on a puzzle (don't worry, I won't spoil the solution) where we were separated by soundproof glass. We didn't have walkie-talkies with us, so I communicated non-verbally to signal Tyler and Morgan to perform certain actions on the other side of the glass. First, I tried pointing at things, but that wasn't clear enough, so we tried a system where I raised and lowered my arms in a sequence. That worked a lot better and we got halfway through the puzzle.

But there's a day-night cycle in Big Walk, and as the sun set, the world grew dark—like not "videogame dark," but realistically dark. Since the wall behind me was green, and I had coincidentally chosen to paint my body green earlier in the game, I started blending into the wall behind me in the dim light. That meant Morgan and Tyler could no longer clearly see my arm motions—and they couldn't tell me they couldn't see my arm motions because I was behind soundproof glass.

When I saw them doing the wrong action, I ran to the glass and pounded my little fists on it, hoping to alert them: but their backs were turned and they couldn't hear the "tink tink tink" of my hands beating on glass because, again, soundproofing.

We had to start the puzzle over again, but it was such a silly situation none of us minded, and on our final try we also found a solution to the darkness problem. Third time's the charm.

Progress in Big Walk is tantalizing: reaching a new area means gaining a new view of the island, getting glimpses of more puzzles and structures and features in the distance, giving your efforts a new direction. It's like stepping into a more relaxed version of Myst or The Witness: there are lots of mysteries on the island to unravel but no frustration to go along with them—and you've got your friends there to help.

Before you visit the island for yourself, I'm issuing a final warning: Don't play this Big Walk while chatting with your pals over Discord. Only use in-game proximity chat. The game will warn you as such on first launch, and while many prox chat games are still just as fun over Discord, this one isn't.

Being able to hear your friends no matter where they are will make things far too easy and will rob you of some of the creative solutions and little disasters that makes the world so satisfying to explore. To accommodate, Big Walk comes with high quality voice chat that includes noise cancelling and a dedicated mute button.

Plus, the faster you solve the puzzles, the quicker you'll finish Big Walk—and this is one game where you definitely don't want to rush to the end. It's out August 4.

Citizens! We live in times of unprecedented danger! We are beset on all sides by traitors and saboteurs. Reactionaries whisper treason in dimly lit rooms. Their mouths spew poison and lies that eat away at the foundations of the worker-peasant revolution, at the root of the world revolution itself.

And, worst of all, no one gave me a desk big enough to deal with it.

What Awaits, Aleksey? is a clever mystery/puzzle game that caters to all my specific obsessions. It's a Stasi simulator, more or less—you are Aleksey Lutomski, a recent hire at the security service of a fictional 20th-century communist state, tasked with identifying the members of an underground cell of dissidents who are going around saying mean things about the motherland.

For the most part, this means obsessing over the tidiness of your desk. It is no longer World War 2 and you are not Stierlitz. You are not kicking in doors and taking down fascist spies with a Tokarev. It is 1970: the socialist sixth of the Earth has settled into bleary stagnation. The enemies of the state are disaffected academics and you fight them by going through their mail.

So, each day, you sit behind your desk and open a new sachet of evidence—little bits and pieces of info that you can assemble to identify members of the underground, anti-state KNOT network. You decode ciphered letters, pore over covert photos, listen to wiretapped conversations, all to piece together a picture of who each member of the conspiracy is, attaching codenames to real names and photos and sending them off for verification at the end of the day.

In what I've played, the game walks a nice balance, difficulty-wise. There comes a point where you've amassed enough data to be damn-near certain about a person's identity. At others, I've made leaps of logic to figure someone out a little early. Further still, I've made leaps of logic that did not pan out, and duly got chewed out by my socialist superiors when I came into work the next day.

I've played around an hour of the game so far, and it's all quite pleasingly difficult and even more pleasingly physical. WAA makes full use of its 1970s setting to burden your creaking desk with tools that are all fantastically mechanical and corporeal. Your personal enigma machine is a fat mechanical calculator in copper and brass, your tape recorder is a chunk of brown plastic.

All this gear vies with ever-increasing stacks of paper for space on your desk as you try to zero in on the clues that might lead you to uncover the conspirators' identities while disregarding the red herrings (though you can, fortunately, send stuff on your desk to the phantom zone when you're done using it).

I suspect it's all leading to a Papers, Please-esque choice where I can elect to throw in with the conspirators or stay loyal to the motherland. I think I can guess which way will net me a good ending, but look, I'll sign up with whichever side promises to get me a larger desk.

While I spent much of 2025 obsessed with Blue Prince, PC Gamer's 'best design' GOTY award winner, it wasn't the only killer puzzle game to release near the beginning of last year. The Roottrees are Dead, a game mostly spent sitting at a computer (yours, and also a virtual one) sussing out what happened to a sprawling family. It's not the first game to use that sort of interface to cast you as the sleuth with a dense mystery to solve, but it was enough of a hit to immediately spawn imitators.

Developer Evil Trout, meanwhile, has been working on its own follow-up, and it looks like it's going to be a hit, too. The Incident at Galley House, released on Tuesday, has already pulled in more than 600 Steam reviews with an overwhelmingly positive 97% of them giving it a thumbs up.

If just over a year's turnaround strikes you as suspiciously fast to design two great puzzle games, you've got good instincts. Both The Roottrees are Dead and The Incident at Galley House actually started as visually simplistic browser games released on Itch.io.

"At some point, Evil Trout, another developer reached out to me through Discord and mentioned he thought it should be a full, paid project," Roottrees designer Jeremy Johnston wrote on Itch last year. "He and I collaborated to make that happen, with me doing design work and writing extra content, and him handling coding and building the game itself.

"The remake turned out incredible, and with how much fun we had making it we decided we wanted to work together again. When it came time to figure out what to work on next a lot of ideas swirled around, but almost as if by fate, another free mystery game was coming onto the scene. It was also posted to itchio and even cited Roottrees as an inspiration."

That game, titled Type Help, was a purely text-based mystery from developer William Rous. PC Gamer contributor Abbie Stone listed it as one of the nine games that proved 2025 was the best year ever for the detective genre. "You’ll endure that deliberately frustrating interface for both the rush of those deductions and to get more of its gripping story that would be an all-time great detective yarn in any medium," she wrote last December. "Fingers crossed the upcoming remake can retain the stripped-back magic of 2025’s finest detective game."

Safe to say the collaboration between Rous, Johnson, and Evil Trout has worked out pretty well, judging by the reception on Steam. It's no longer a straightforward text game, with a visual novel-style presentation that includes 2D illustrations, a "mysterious 3D interface for navigating memories" and voice acting. You can read more about the collaboration in a nice, in-depth interview over at Games Industry.

I didn't get sucked into The Roottrees are Dead the way I did Blue Prince, but I'm here for a wave of detective games that credit the masterful Return of the Obra Dinn as their inspiration—especially when they clearly have ideas of their own.

The Incident at Galley House is $20 (£17.75) on Steam, though with a 10% launch discount until July 21.

We are, as a people, awash in old operating system simulators. The Roottrees Are Dead, Hack '95, Pipes.exe—something deep inside us yearns for the old ways. We remember, hazily, as though glimpsed through fog, a time when booting up the PC yielded an ethereal Brian Eno startup noise and a world of possibility, rather than an Office 365 upsell and exciting new AI features*.

We are also all getting old, yes. That might have something to do with it too.

The latest entry into the crowded fake OS genre is Desktop Explorer, a mystery/horror game that tasks you with poking through the clearly-but-not-explicitly Windows 95 machine that's been left to you by your uncle. Unc's mind has gone to pieces and his computer is filled with mysteries—ever-deepening puzzles that task you with assembling clues, piecing together events, and using an expanding suite of era-appropriate software to figure just what the heck your uncle was mixed up in, and to find the passwords to locked files that peel back layer after layer of the game's motivating mystery.

Desktop Explorer's pseudo-PC is wild and untamed—the rich and unexplored land of '90s computing rendered in faithful detail. There is no cloud here, no apps, and the desperate desire of tech firms to herd us all into neat walled gardens had not yet taken hold. It is the computing of wandering down a file tree and seeing what you find. Often, what you find is ghosts.

The computer, like most computers, is haunted. As you plumb deeper into the mystery, eerie goings-on start happening, first in the relatively benign format of corrupted files, later in crashes, symbols, and faces that manifest behind your cluttered windows.

It's genuinely quite spooky, insofar as a Windows 95 personal computer can be scary, and I don't think I'm far enough in for things to get properly supernatural yet. As for the puzzles, I've had a good time with them. The ones I've encountered range from straightforward to pleasant—but not overly frustrating—brainteasers.

The rhythm is good: you plough your way through three or four puzzles in a row before the game hits you with one that at least makes you pause for a minute, mousing through all the programs available to you and options in your file browser to figure just which bit of arcane '90s computing technology you need to get yourself going again.

A glance at the game's Steam page suggests there are even stranger puzzles to come. In the hour or so I've spent with it, Desktop Explorer is a game that remembers when the computer was itself a bit of a mystery: an unmapped land whose edges and limits you had to find for yourself. It's nice to return.

*You can find the Linux distro that's right for you over on Distrosea, just by the by.

Do you remember the first time you went on Google Maps and looked for your house? I was just nine-years-old when it launched in the UK and it felt like the coolest thing ever. Then Street View came a few years later and me and my friends would gather around the computer to walk to school or the shops.

Now, the innocent fun of excitedly looking at a map is back, gamified by the likes of Geoguessr, popularised by streamer Rainbolt. It inspired a ton of videogame variants, so you can guess locations in sprawling worlds like Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA 5, and more. But while those are all fun, they're not exactly full games. Enter Locator: The Search for Abigail Lidari.

Locator is a "Geoguessr-inspired detective game" that sees you looking for a missing archaeologist on an alien planet, so there's no need to go brushing up on your knowledge of where different kinds of trees and grass grow here on Earth. We just got a full minute of the all-new look of the game at the PC Gaming Show—it's had a lick of spit and polish since its January 2025 demo.

The core concept is still the same, though. You're handed a picture snapped from ground level and try to figure out where they were taken. This being a videogame, things get progressively more difficult and engaging. As Christopher Livingston wrote after his time with the demo, "Sometimes you'll need to read journal entries for clues, puzzle over alien hieroglyphs, and even do a tiny bit of (gulp) math." You'll also get to learn more about the planet and Abigail Lidari, the missing archaeologist.

Locator is being developed by Empty Exhibit, which has just brought on Playstack as the publisher. That's the team that helped bring Balatro to the masses, so you know the people there have an eye for cool games.

If Locator sounds like you're kind of game, wishlist it on Steam and sign up for playtest and the newsletter to stay up-to-date with all the latest on Abigail's whereabouts.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

One of my (not entirely unreasonable) fears is waking up on a spaceship alone, drifting in a great void that wants to kill you if it's given even the slightest chance. I'm glad I never have to experience that, let alone over and over again on loop.

Such is the fate of one Miranda Vigneau in Rivage, who awakes aboard the A.R.E.S. space station above the promising planetary candidate VESTA—her crew's gone, and the station itself is acting weird, though this being a sci-fi mystery, there'll be plenty of ominous logs strewn around the place to help you piece things together.

Assisting you is something called the "K9 system", which means you can lock in certain puzzle solutions so you don't go mad solving them over and over. Probably a vital bit of systems architecture in a game like this.

You'll still need to loop, though, because the station only has so much power in it—the thing that kills you in Rivage isn't some horrid alien or biological parasite, but space itself. Basically, power's the ticking time bomb that'll bring your present run to an end—though Miranda doesn't get spaced or anything.

Instead, you head on over to a mysterious arcade machine to kick the loop off all over again when the lights go out. In other words, Rivage seems to be angling itself as less of a horror game ala Alien: Isolation or an existential dread/hope simulator like Outer Wilds, and more of a sci-fi mystery with some interpersonal character development via your absentee crew.

Rivage promises to bend your brain with puzzles that hinge on "gravity, magnetism, and the very flow of time"—which, if you like cracking open a good mystery, sounds a treat. It plans to release August 13 this year, though you can play a demo on Steam and take a crack at Miranda's puzzle predicament for yourself.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Myst is the game best known for driving adoption of the CD-ROM drive, but as a Halloween-obsessed kid in the '90s, The 7th Guest was where it was at for me. The 1993 puzzle-adventure game was, like Myst, one of the first games that required a CD-ROM drive—but unlike Myst, sometimes your mouse cursor was a skull with bulging eyeballs and a throbbing brain. Hell yeah.

In the spirit of the original's once cutting-edge hardware requirement, a remake of The 7th Guest came out for VR headsets in 2023. A non-VR version of that remake is now due out June 4 on Steam, which led me to chat with the remake's director, Paul van der Meer, and one of the creators of the original 1993 game, Rob Landeros.

I took the opportunity to ask about a bit of '90s gaming lore: The supposed on-the-spot "firing" of Landeros and programmer Graeme Devine after they pitched the idea for The 7th Guest. Wikipedia states simply that the pair founded Trilobyte Games after being "fired from Virgin Games."

Landeros had been hired by Virgin to bring a cinematic touch to "bargain bin" games, as he put it, but eventually he and Devine got the idea to do something original. The pair had been flying around to tech conferences, taking meetings with "a bunch of suits" about that brand new CD-ROM technology, which as Landeros recalls wasn't being pitched as anything fun. They were "just storing a bunch of data on discs and sharing it, you know, in corporations." Boo.

After a few of these meetings, Landeros and Devine started brainstorming at an airport, where they "wrote stuff on the back of a napkin, literally." Shortly thereafter they proposed the idea for The 7th Guest to Martin Alper, then president of Virgin Interactive. Alper, who passed away in 2015, recounted what he told the pair in a 2013 interview:

"When they approached me, I said to them: I hear everything you have to say, but you are fired. That's the truth, that's what I said. They just looked at me very strangely, wondering what was going on. I said, well, I want to support you, I want to produce this game, but we can't do it inside Virgin because it would be disruptive to everybody else who were working on much less ambitious projects."

Landeros tells me that the tale of that friendly firing is "hyperbole," but affirmed that Alper read their proposal and almost immediately greenlit The 7th Guest over lunch, with the agreement that they'd go make the game outside of Virgin.

"I've seen instances where a special project is set aside, and then the people go to work on it in another part of the building, and [other employees] go, 'What are those guys doing here? Why do they get this?'" said Landeros. "So I kind of wanted to avoid that. We felt this was a big enough project, it was going to take up all our time, we didn't need distractions, and so we just said, you know, we should do it elsewhere, and we'll even form our own company."

With a contract from Virgin, Landeros and Devine moved to Oregon to start their studio, Trilobyte Games, where they began experimenting with Autodesk's 3D design software to create The 7th Guest's haunted interiors, as well as those custom cursors I remember so clearly.

"We didn't have Photoshop … I was sitting there trying to make these animated icons in these old tools, and they kind of didn't work," Landeros told me. "And then I just went, 'Oh, wait a minute, Autodesk 3D animator came with a skull model, and an eye is easy to make, and so you know, 'I'll just make the skull, the jaw flap, or the eyes roll around, and the brain throbbing,' and I think I created the whole animation about two hours or something."

None of that would come close to filling up a CD-ROM, though; they needed video to accomplish that, so they shot the ghosts of The 7th Guest's mansion on Betamax tapes and created "terrible" digital files: "It's a good thing ghosts are transparent," Landeros joked, because it helped them hide the video's flaws.

Whatever misgivings about the video quality Landeros may have today, at CES in Las Vegas in 1991, a demo of The 7th Guest "blew people's minds," he said. That's when he and Devine knew they really had something.

The 7th Guest was followed by a sequel, The 11th Hour, and now the remake, which features new puzzles and a cool, more technologically-advanced take on the original's FMV scenes: "volumetric video" that allows players to view the actors from any angle. It was essential for VR, but looks cool in the non-VR version, too.

Van der Meer is a big fan of the original 7th Guest, and had been in contact with Landeros over email before ever pitching the idea of a remake. It was at a birthday party that he suggested to the CEO of Vertigo Games, known for Arizona Sunshine and the new Thief VR game, that the '90s classic would be great for the medium, and they went for it.

The new flatspace version of the remake, simply called The 7th Guest Remake, will be out soon on Steam. It's "pretty much the same" as the VR remake, but with a new interface and one puzzle room redesigned to avoid VR-specific controls.

You probably haven't heard of the indie puzzle game Ouros before now, but you may have seen it and possibly even played it in an altogether different game. That's because, according to Ouros developer Michael Kamm, MiHoYo "copied" the game and put it into Zenless Zone Zero, a claim he backed up with some solid video evidence.

The puzzle was added to Zenless Zone Zero in 2025, according to Kamm, but he's bringing the matter to light now because of recent comments accusing him of copying Zenless. Which, he says, is understandable: "Because MiHoYo is an established billion-dollar company, and Ouros isn't well known, I can see why people would assume that I copied them," Hamm says in the video. "But still, it's frustrating to have your work cloned and then credited to somebody else."

Last year, miHoYo copied my puzzle game Ouros in Zenless Zone Zero. Because they are a recognized, billion-dollar studio and my game isn't well known, some people are now assuming that their version is the original, and mine is the clone. I hope this video clears that up.

— @michaelkamm.games (@michaelkamm.games.bsky.social) 2026-05-27T20:56:39.978Z

The video comparing Ouros and ZZZ highlights the very similar gameplay they share—both involve manipulating curves in a roughly identical manner—as well as "specific design choices" including "curve portals" that teleport the ball to different spots on the track, the hint system, a reverse direction control, and even the hazy flowing background that appears in both versions of the game. There's enough to it that ascribing the similarities to coincidence takes a little more effort than it does in other cases where games look alike but are distinct enough to be different.

Which happens: Over on X, some people responding to Kamm's message have suggested that Ouros is actually a copy of the 2023 online game Primo, which offers very similar gameplay. But Kamm countered by saying that Primo looks like a copy of Splines 'n Shapes, a Ludum Dare game jam project he made in 2020.

The exchange illustrates the difficulties faced by developers (especially small indie developers) when games that are similar to existing projects—sometimes very similar—come to light. Broad concepts are borrowed all the time by both indie and big developers: Just look at the surge in bullet heaven games following the success of Vampire Survivors, for instance, or the similar rise of Balatro-likes after that game became a runaway hit. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as they say, and it's tricky to win copyright claims over game design. Of course, only big publishers generally have the resources to even consider lawsuits.

In this particular case, there are two things weighing against MiHoYo. First and foremost are the granular similarities between the two games, which go beyond just "they look alike" and get into, as Kamm put it, specific elements of design.

And second, well, this is not the first time something like this has come to light. In April, Pipapo Games levelled a similar accusation against MiHoYo, saying it had copied the studio's upcoming Map Map (a game about maps, in case that wasn't clear) for Genshin Impact.

Map Map isn't out yet—it launches on May 28—but a demo for the game has been available on Steam for about a year, according to one developer. "It's a strange feeling to see one of the biggest games on the market straight up copying it," they wrote. "And all of that just shortly before we want to release."

Kamm hasn't indicated that he intends to pursue the matter further, only that he wants to set the record straight. I've reached out to Kamm and MiHoYo for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

The Talos Principle 3 is coming, and I'm very excited: What initially attracted my attention as a sideshow curiosity from the Serious Sam guys quickly proved itself a clever puzzle game powered by an unexpectedly compelling and thoughtful narrative. I like it a lot! And so it's kind of a bummer that Croteam insists, with absolute certainty, that the third will be the last.

It's unusual in the world of videogames (or movies, or television, or any other popular media built for consumption) to say "no more," but writer Jonas Kyratzes told me during a recent chat that Croteam doesn't think of Talos Principle as "a franchise that will go on and on and on." Instead, the studio had a broad concept of how it wanted to tell the story across three games, and now, "This is the end. This is the last Talos Principle."

"We might do some small spinoff one day or something like that, but the story of Talos Principle ends with three," Kyratzes said.

"So many videogames just don't end, and then you have an endless kind of cliffhanger or whatever, and there's no satisfying conclusion to the story. And then at some point the company closes, and this story is never completed. And with Talos Principle, that's not what we want to do. We want to tell the story and then be done with it ... Really, the idea is to have a complete work—the way that we look at it is that this is one thing. It's one story in three parts. And when it's done, I think that will also kind of be visible. That was the kind of the intent."

Game director Davor Hunski said that if Talos Principle 3 is on par with the first two games in the series—and I don't think there's any expectation it won't be, but you never want to be overconfident about these things—it will make The Talos Principle "one of the best" videogame trilogies, and more broadly, "really, really special in gaming," even though puzzle games are a relatively niche genre.

"We have Serious Sam, right? We've been developing Serious Sam for 20 years," Hunski said. "But Talos Principle is on a different level of emotion, and people's engagement and reaction. Life-changing stuff actually gets reported to us through feedback, through emails—very personal life-changing, moving stuff."

Serious Sam, the 'other' Croteam game, is indeed a very different sort of experience—a hyper-violent FPS that revels in excessive bloodshed and the preternaturally thick skull of its hero. I've been a Serious Sam fan since the original in 2001 and remain so to this day, but on a deeper, this game matters level, The Talos Principle is the one that's stuck with me.

"It is a very particular game. It is a very unique kind of thing, and people have very powerful responses to it," Kyratzes added. "I mean, it's not the only game that has that, but it's certainly very gratifying and beautiful that people respond very strongly to this kind of humanist spirit of it, and that they're moved by it and they care about it. And again, that's why you don't want to treat it as a franchise, where it's a burger, and you make another burger, and then you make another burger.

"The story is told. The things that we wanted to do are accomplished. Hopefully it's satisfying as an arc, from the beginning of new humanity to its distant future. And that's that. And then you can play it, and you can have this beautiful experience. You can be happy with it."

Four years ago, we declared that ingenious puzzle designer Zach Gage's Knotwords might dethrone Wordle as our favorite daily word puzzle game. Well, here I am making the same claim again in 2026: Gage and his collaborators at the puzzle site Puzzmo have a new game out today, called Ribbit. Ribbit has something Wordle is sorely lacking: Frogs.

Ribbit is an anagram game. It gives you a grid of letters that are connected together, some to multiple other letters and some to just one. From the jumbled letters you have to trace lines that form words of four or more letters, and as the letters are fully used up they'll disappear off the grid, turning into frogs. They are very cute.

For reasons I can't fathom the frogs don't actually ribbit each time they pop up on the puzzle board or when you click them, which almost feels like a betrayal of the game's name. But they remain a much more satisfying reward than a row of green squares, especially because they get all bouncy when you finish off the whole puzzle.

There are a couple other wrinkles to Ribbit. It'll reward you with a star when you find the longest word in the puzzle, which is worth extra points and also helps you hone in just a little bit on the size of the words that remain. A gauge keeps track of how many of the total words you've found, so you're not just stumbling around until you're done. And unlike in Wordle, there's no penalty for tracing out a path of letters that don't make a word and then letting go of your mouse or taking your finger off your phone screen; you can keep guessing until you've found all the words. There were 19 in today's puzzle.

As has become standard with daily puzzle games, Ribbit also generates a shareable scorecard, which tracks how long you took to complete the puzzle and how quickly you found that star word, encouraging you to sniff it out quickly.

There's also, tantalizingly, a puzzle within the puzzle. When you use up a letter and it turns into a frog, it can be one of four colors, and you can then click the frogs to "pop" them like you're playing a match three game. (Don't worry, they come back if you refresh the page). The order you use up each letter has some effect here, though I didn't get it right on my first try.

"It's based on how you solve the puzzle," Gage posted on Bluesky. "It's meant to be a secret. If you get really into it, there are ways to play that let you get a frenzy every day."

A frenzy, eh. Those frogs better scream with joy once I figure Ribbit out.

As with other Puzzmo games, you can play today's game for free, but dipping into the archive (which includes daily crosswords, mini crosswords, and half a dozen other game types) requires Puzzmo Plus, which is a $40 annual subscription. Much better deal than the NYT Games, especially since you're supporting indie game designers and get this sick deck of cards from BoJack Horseman's artist for free.

Located on the outskirts of Tokyo, in a bare bones room you can find The Sorting Bureau where things arrive to be put in order by your diligent self. Much like A Little to the Left and other sorting sims that have come before it, The Sorting Bureau is a slow paced mindful experience which is best enjoyed on a rainy day with a cup of tea.

It's exactly the kind of game I like to have in my back pocket when I feel in need of something a little more relaxing than my usual choice of game. Those usually have me running from zombies or beating my head against the wall trying to figure out what the hell a "Drifter" is and why it keeps chasing me.

But I don't have to worry about any of that here, there's nothing complicated to The Sorting Bureau. You open boxes that clients have sent you, which are full of their nicknacks, and sort it all into smaller boxes in an orderly fashion. I muddled through sweets, nails, stamps, leaves, and coins assigning them to boxes depending on the item, colour, metallic glint, or even how edible they are. Spoiler: the coins are not edible.

It seems too simple, but often the best things are. I spent an hour and a half making my way through The Sorting Bureau's demo. At times things may have taken a bit too long as I would painstakingly stack coins or cogs on top of one another depending on their size and pattern. But whenever I got bored of my diligence I'd return to simply hurling items towards the boxes, getting through some tasks as quickly as humanly possible.

You go at your own pace in The Sorting Bureau, taking as much or as little care as you want or see fit for each task. But no matter how much time you spend on a job it's all equally as satisfying.

The Talos Principle 3, the third and final chapter of one of the least-expected videogame series of all time, was made official today, and much like the jump from the first game to the second, it promises a familiar slate of puzzles wrapped in a very different sort of narrative experience.

The teaser doesn't reveal much about what's in store for the third game, except that this is a conclusion, of sorts: "Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Birth, life, death," the narrator intones. "But we are not stories."

That's some serious Talos Principle teasing, alright, and as a fan of the series, it hits. That opening shot of the boundless cosmos seems pretty meaningful too, and I should probably point out that if you haven't played the previous Talos Principle games and want to enjoy them without spoilers, now would be a good time to go read something else.

A hiddenish Talos Principle 2 ending reveals the existence of an anomaly, billions of light years from Earth, whose existence defies the otherwise complete and infallible "theory of everything" discovered by Athena. The cutscene for that conclusion includes an image of distant stars identical to the one seen in today's teaser. It's no great surprise, then, that we're going to be learning more about that in Talos Principle 3.

From today's announcement: "As if awakening from a troubled sleep, you find yourself in a strange, contradictory world of crumbling temples and abandoned science outposts: the Anomaly, the only place in the universe where the laws of physics don't work as they should. Your memories are fragmented, but you know you came here for a reason."

Big stuff, clearly, and it will lead players across more than 12 worlds in an exploration of "the remains of the world that humanity once built," which sounds kind of ominous depending on which version of humanity we're talking about—but, as with the first two games, The Talos Principle 3 will tell its tale of a foundational moment in human history "as lived through a person's life."

"It's about your life, the character that you play. And so you will see many different places based on that," lead writer Jonas Kyratzes told me in a recent interview. "It's a historical moment seen through the eyes of a person. So it's the rebirth of humanity in the first game, and then it's this turning point in their history in the second one, but lived through the life of 1K and his friends. And this is about what came after that, lived again through the life, seen through the life of a character. And with the anomaly—the exploration of the anomaly is a significant part of that.

"So it does have a kind of a wide scope, and in some ways—while remaining still focused on this character and characters around them, these stories are all character driven—but together, they form this bigger picture of humanity, from its kind of resurrection to the distant future."

Experience with the first two games isn't necessary to play and enjoy Talos Principle 3, but writer Verena Kyratzes said it will definitely land with more impact if you're familiar with them, comparing it to her own experience with Star Trek. "The shows exist independently of each other," she said. "But I watched TNG before I'd seen the original series, and there was the episode where Scotty showed up, and I was like, 'Who is that?' So yeah, you will always get a little bit more if you played the previous games."

I can attest to this: The opening of Talos Principle 2 is laden with callbacks to the original, none more powerful than the voice of Elohim welcoming you to his garden—a moment that just won't carry the same kind of weight if it's your first time hearing it. And yes, Elohim will be back for The Talos Principle 3.

"It was very important to us emotionally, because the fact that he's there, that after that ending there is still hope for him—that what he was afraid of, which was a world without purpose, is still something where he can thrive," Jonas told me. "And the fact that you then see in the DLC Isle of the blessed, you see an Elohim who was kind of born from the algorithm, and you get the idea there's probably going to be more of him, even just existing in the in the outside world, that's incredibly significant to us.

"He is a thread through all of these games, and he has a significant part to play in this game too, and that was kind of like, it had to be there."

A release date for The Talos Principle 3 wasn't announced but it's "coming soon," and is up for wishlisting now on Steam.

The puzzle game Wordle, onetime viral sensation and now a daily fixture of the New York Times, is becoming a gameshow that will be broadcast in both the UK and US.

Broadcaster NBC is behind the TV adaptation, which will be filmed in Manchester, England, and hosted by Savannah Guthrie, who currently presents the network's morning show Today. US chat show host Jimmy Fallon's production company, Electric Hot Dog, will co-produce the series.

Fallon said he felt "very honoured to be working with Savannah Guthrie on this show," adding that Guthrie "has that rare combination of intelligence, charm, and warmth that makes everyone feel instantly welcome.

"And she obviously knows how to host a show. I am super proud and happy and I think we developed a solid game for prime-time."

The exact format that the show will take is yet to be revealed, though it will presumably need to come up with variations on the original game's simple premise of finding a five-letter word in six guesses. Wordle does already have the competitive element of which player has the fewest guesses before a correct answer, but the basic idea will need some bulking out to sustain a half-hour light entertainment show.

NBC has announced some details. Players will be competing for a cash prize, and the show will use the Wordle name, aesthetic and typeface.

Wordle's filming was delayed after the disappearance of Guthrie's elderly mother, Nancy Guthrie, in February. Savannah Guthrie took an extended leave of absence at the time, before returning to the Today show in April. The 84 year-old remains missing.

The puzzle game was created by Welsh developer Josh Wardle in 2021, who after its breakout success sold Wordle to the New York Times for a seven-figure sum in 2022. Wardle originally intended the game as an idle amusement for his girlfriend, and at first it was titled "Mr Bugs' Wordy Nugz" before he decided to make the name a play on his own surname.

More recently, Wardle created the "tricky wordplay game" Parsewords, which takes its inspiration from cryptic crosswords, and told the Sunday Times "I haven't played [Wordle] since the day I sold it."

Casting for the first season of Wordle is now open, with the show due to premiere in 2027.

Videogames are a great way to do stuff with your friends. In Golf With Your Friends, you could golf with your friends without going through the trouble of actually golfing with your friends.

Now, you can gamble with your friends (without having to actually gamble with your friends) thanks to one game: Gamble With Your Friends. Are you still with me? Anyway, gambling always pays, so it tracks that the game sold a million copies in a week.

"We're soooo happy and speechless by the positive reception our game has gotten so far," wrote developer SkyBrave in a blog post sharing the sales figure. "We're aware of the bugs you've been reporting, and the team is hard at work addressing them as soon as possible!"

If you aren't familiar with the game, it's a self-described "casino crawler" where you're trapped inside a gambling establishment in a Saw-like conundrum: claw your way out of debt, or "face the consequences."

It cleverly leans into the social aspect by giving everyone a shared bank account. Your friend at the blackjack table just hit on a hard 17 and lost a boatload of cash for everyone? I'm sure everyone playing with them will have the patience of a saint.

It's all about frantic co-op buffoonery and proximity voice chat, and features delightfully goofy player avatars, so I'm comfortable categorizing this is as part of the "friendslop" trend established by games like Peak, Lethal Company, and REPO. These games took 2025 by storm and they're showing no signs of slowing down.

It's hard to say how long they will dominate the sales charts or what's caused their sudden surge in popularity, but it probably helps that these games run on archaic hardware and tend to come cheap. Gamble With Your Friends, for example, is just eight dollars—and as Peak creator Nick Kaman established earlier this year in a mind-blowing demonstration of economic insight, eight bucks is basically five bucks.

Fangamer's videogame tie-ins have drawn our attention multiple times in the past, from the Stardew Valley boxed edition complete with farm-ownership deed, to the angry psychic squid from Into the Breach in huggable plushie form. They recently released a fancy vinyl edition of the soundtrack to Myst sequel Riven, but this time the response has been divided.

As noticed by multiple commenters in a thread on the Myst subreddit (via Time Extension) the gatefold art by composer Robyn Miller, depicting the mysterious Age 234, has the look of generative AI. Miller replied to confirm he'd used AI tools in the art, but defended his use of them to finalize art he says began with old-fashioned pencil sketches of the concept:

"The tools are advanced enough that, once one has a concept, especially a sketch, arriving at a final image is not so difficult. This involved iteration after more iteration, adjusting small parts of the image, and shifting portions of the image. Even once the final design was complete, I could shift elements such as the angle, type of film that was used, the age of film, film grain, time of day, weather, lens on the camera, camera used, ISO, etc... changing the image slightly each time. It's a process of two steps forward, one step back. Dozens of iterations."

Miller, who co-created both Myst and Riven, also took time to defend himself from accusations of creating "AI slop" specifically, with the bold take that actually it's a lot of the real "slop" out there has nothing to do with generative AI.

"From the beginning of my career," Miller wrote, "I have always been an early adopter of tools. Tools do not make the art. The artist makes the art. Any artist can take a brush and, without thinking, an artist can create slop. In fact, the internet is overwhelmed by endless amounts of ART SLOP. And 3D SLOP. When artists design without intent, or copy other people's styles, or create with any thought or care... the result is slop. And it's everywhere."

If you were still capable of seeing the word "slop" without semantic satiation setting in before you read the paragraph above, I imagine that's changed now. Sorry.

Fangamer responded to Time Extension's initial reporting with this statement: "Our internal policy prohibits art created by generative AI in our products, but it’s one we hadn’t directly addressed with all of our outside artists, especially on products like this one, where development began well before the widespread use of image generation. In this case our role in the soundtrack was limited to layout and production, so we weren’t aware of which tools were used to create the gatefold illustration; anyone who has ordered the soundtrack and is unhappy with the product is welcome to contact our customer service and request a cancellation or return, which we’ll process no-questions-asked. We’ve begun updating our artist and partnership agreements to reflect our AI use policy, so that moving forward we can proactively address it with everyone we work with."

I strolled into a late April event for Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight in a funk. Traffic was horrendous on the morning journey into Los Angeles, sleep was crap the night before, and topping off my car cost $45. Were this a hands-on with any other Batman game, the brooding might've helped me get into the mind of the caped crusader.

But as I should've guessed from developer Traveller's Tales' modern Lego run, Legacy of the Dark Knight is just too darn delightful to sustain a stormy mood. It took all of five minutes for the brick-based brawler to put a smile on my face, and it didn't go away for two hours of play.

I'm a fan of this new era of TT Lego games. They're not pumping them out as quickly as they used to—the last one, The Skywalker Saga, released four years ago—but that's because each is deeper, grander, and fundamentally fun enough to appeal to anyone, not just the kiddos. Gone is the old fixed camera, now replaced with a full 3D sandbox. Gone is the "mash square" combat, enhanced now by slightly more cerebral dodge and counter buttons. And in the case of Legacy of the Dark Knight, gone are the dozens upon dozens of unlockable characters—in their place a lean cast of sidekicks with distinct abilities and skill trees. It's a superhero game in the same mold that the Arkham series created.

It should be considered a tragedy that Batman hasn't had a game to himself in 11 years (eight if you care to count the Telltale series, or two if you still have a VR headset). We didn't know it at the time, but Arkham Knight was the last hurrah for the greatest detective's turn in the videogame spotlight. Legacy of the Dark Knight is a colossal exercise in reverence for all things Batman, but in terms of gameplay it's specifically a monument to Rocksteady's legendary run.

That is to say: You can consider this Lego Batman a spiritual Arkham entry, or at least the closest thing we're going to get to one anytime soon. TT is open about the elements it's pulling from the series—the signature combat, open world Gotham, Riddler puzzles, and a light touch of stealth.

The goal is to make the "ultimate Batman game," as TT development head Johnathan Smith told me, and where better to start than the best superhero games ever made?

Brick breaker

My demo was a series of disconnected missions that began at the Iceberg Lounge, the headquarters of crime boss Carmine Falcone. Legacy of the Dark Knight tells one continuous Batman story that begins all the way back in that miserable alley, but each chapter is themed around a different interpretation of the hero.

This chapter near the start of the game was stylized around Matt Reeves' The Batman. The greener Bruce is joined for the first(?) time by detective Jim Gordon (whose Jefferey Wright likeness does not appear to change no matter the era or outfit).

Within two seconds of stepping through the front door, Batman and Gordon are accosted by goons, and the camera pulls out to a familiar angle. Combat is where the strongest Arkham vibes lie: nudging Batman in a direction zips him to the closest punchable face, triangle triggers violent counters, and there's a dodge for unblockable attacks. Batarangs even serve the same purpose as in Arkham, stunning enemies and opening them up to a rapid combo that obliterates them into pieces.

I never entered any real danger with eight hearts of HP, but apparently cranking up the difficulty cuts it down to three. Smith told me dying actually has a consequence in Legacy of the Dark Knight—you're whisked back to a checkpoint instead of popping back into the fight where you stand.

I suspect a highlight of Legacy of the Dark Knight will be the light puzzle solving between fights. An early obstacle required using Gordon's satisfying goop launcher to gum up the gears of a lighting gantry so they can be used as platforms. Another involved sneaking Catwoman into a rich guy's apartment by slotting color-coded books into the right shelves, then sending her cat through a special vent to unlock a door on the other side. Breezy and charming.

The only Batman behavior that felt lacking in my demo was stealth. There was a stealth phase with some encounters that let me silently thin the chaff, but it was extremely simplistic in a bad way. There's no "sneak" button and you don't have to worry about making too much noise, as most guards just stood still with their backs to Batman as if waiting for their cue.

I hope these begin to resemble real stealth opportunities later on, but if they don't, I'll understand why: Arkham's gargoyle skulking and ventilation-stalking was probably deemed too slow or boring for the kids (but it's my favorite part of those games). At least the takedowns themselves are funny—my favorite was Lego Batman tapping on a guy's shoulder and startling him so badly that he exploded into bits.

A few other mission-specific notes:

• The last mission of the demo was a Poison Ivy boss fight that, unfortunately, bugged out halfway through. Ivy's monster stopped swinging at me and I got to keep pounding on it until it died. Anticlimactic.
• Dick Grayson's Robin is introduced through a playable circus sequence that was super creative and fun. It ended not with Robin's parents dying, but them weirdly deciding that Robin can go live with a creepy loner in a cave forever? A situation where the G-rated sanitization is more upsetting than the actual story.
• There's a bit in the Iceberg Lounge where Batman and Gordon need to "blend in" by dancing, which I thought was just a cutscene gag, but actually triggered a brief rhythm game. Adorable.
• Not big on Batman's voice. He's trying too hard to be overly-graveled in a way that only Will Arnett can pull off with a straight face.

Toybox

By the time missions were done, I had 20 minutes to wander around open world Gotham. This isn't the first time TT has made a Gotham City hub, but this one's on another level. The multi-island sandbox is unexpectedly large, and I reckon I couldn't run for six seconds without finding a side activity. They really are more activities than quests or missions—brief navigation puzzles, gliding challenges, sudden crime reports, etc. I can see these getting old long before they run dry, but honestly, gliding and driving around the city is such a joy that I can also see myself methodically clearing the map over a long period. There's really no rush with a collectathon of this magnitude.

One thing I wish we could've tested, but could not: multiplayer. Legacy of the Dark Knight has two-player co-op that's local only. No online support is disappointing and strange for a multiplayer game in 2026, but at least the Steam version will support Remote Play Together out of the gate. I tried this last year with a different Lego game and it worked fine. The bad news is you need a decent connection to host a stable stream, but the consolation is player two doesn't need to own their own copy.

TT ended the session with a teaser that convinced me it knows what sort of Batman fans were in attendance: a chapter intro that transformed Gotham into the noir-soaked backgrounds of Batman: The Animated Series. Hell yeah.

It feels silly to admit, but I'm now eagerly seated for this primarily kids' game. The Legacy of the Dark Knight that's taking shape is more elevated Lego excellence—an uncomplicated burst of joy and with a lot of Batman to sink into. It's out May 22.

Wordle isn't quite the draw for me it once was. I still play it most days, but I'm not hitting it first thing in the morning and I don't care about preserving a streak anymore. Sorry, Wordle: the spark is gone.

If, like me, you're on the hunt for a new daily puzzle game, you should take a look at Hunch, which has Wordle-style play but is much, much harder. Put it this way: it's gonna take you more than 6 guesses. Maybe a lot more. Hunch is the Dark Souls of Wordle, basically.

In Hunch, you've got the familiar 5-letter grid to guess the secret word, and after your first guess (mine is always SOUPY, what's yours?) you see which letters are in the right place (tallied in green) and which are in the wrong place but still in the word (yellow).

Thing is, Hunch doesn't tell you which letters are in the right places the way Wordle does. So if SOUPY gets you a green tally of one, all you know is one of the letters in SOUPY is in the right place. If you then try STAKE to see if it's the S, you might get zero green and one yellow tally, which means S wasn't in the right place, but still might be in the word.

Or, it might not: that one yellow tally could mean T, A, K, or E are in the word. Try POSTS next and find out that none of those letters are in the word: congrats, you've already burned 3 guesses just to eliminate that S.

It's Mastermind meets Wordle, essentially, so you can easily blow through a dozen or so guesses before you even really get a handle on what the word could be. Unlike Wordle, there's no limit on guesses, so you just keep on going until you figure it out. I've… I've had some really, really long runs before I figured out the word. Too long to share with you.

Hunch has a daily puzzle to wrap your brain around, and a cool "cascade" mode that requires solving three words consecutively. If you create an account there's even a multiplayer mode where you can challenge a friend to see who's got better hunches. Hunch was created by designer Bennette Sebastian and you can play it here.

Where Unpacking is a game about unravelling someone's life through moving boxes, A Storied Life: Tabitha is one where you piece together who someone was by boxing up their possessions after they die.

It's a wonderfully thoughtful story, one which leaves some nice wiggle room for me to create my own narrative for who this woman was when she was alive. A Storied Life starts off when I receive a letter from this elderly relative, sent to me posthumously, and I'm tasked with visiting her delightfully cosy cottage to tackle her personal belongings.

Each item holds a little fragment of who she once was—an impressive amount of cat accessories and cat-themed decor, some witchy goods, and a handful of oddly-sourced and shady bits thrown in for good measure.

It's all about choosing what to keep, what to auction off, and what to throw away for good. It's where A Storied Life's puzzley elements come into play—each item has its own shape that has to slot nicely into the 'keep' box, while also keeping in mind each item's weight and fragility.

Something looking breakable? I can pop it in some bubble wrap to keep it safe. Soft furnishings can be vac-packed to save space, and paper pieces folded into neat squares. And if it's all a bit too heavy, a few reinforcements of the packing box lets me stuff weightier things inside. It's nothing too challenging, but is a nice way to encourage being thoughtful about which items I snag for myself.

I do wish there was another option to donate something rather than discarding it. It felt a little wrong to be chucking away stuff like homemade gifts and trinkets that I couldn't fit in my box, but the only other option was to recycle them.

Pedantry aside, the items I do claim for myself become the key to writing the story of Tabitha's life. Each possession comes with a handful of key words, and at the end of each chapter I slot them into a few passages to shape a narrative. It does mean that sometimes the story ends up a little weird depending on what I chose—like one chapter where I ended up having to say that I had a gang of cats over for dinner.

But being able to shape the idea of who my Tabitha was is incredibly endearing, and I became immensely careful over which words I was choosing to represent this fictional woman who had passed away. I paid closer attention to what each item was in later levels, thinking of the story they could help me mould at the end of the chapter.

It truly is a wonderful and cosy little game, one that you can easily tackle over a few short evenings. I snuggled in with a cup of hot chocolate and a blanket to play and write this, and it was the exact sort of vibe this game demands. A slow, careful, and thoughtful experience. It's also delightfully British in its quaint setting and handful of objects—I got a little chuckle out of the stereotypical bright plastic off-license lighter I fondly remember knocking around my nana's house when I was very young.

A Storied Life: Tabitha is out now on Steam, and if you're a try-before-you-buy kind of gamer, there's also a demo you can take for a spin first.

I always thought that the most stressful moment from Finding Nemo was the part where Gill and co executed their plan to escape from the dentist's office—it was probably too much suspense for a three-year-old to handle in truth. Well I'm in luck because now I get to relive that childhood stressor all over again with Barely Breathing.

On the surface, Barely Breathing sounds like a horror game, and yes, it may bring back some stressful memories from my childhood but it's really a very fun and charming 3D platformer. You play as a little fish with big dreams: reaching the ocean. But to get there you need to parkour your way around an apartment, tipping over glasses, swimming up storm drains, all while using the seemingly infinite pots of water scattered around the house.

There's only a demo available to play right now, with the full game releasing sometime later this year, but I really had the time of my life splashing around for about 20 minutes.

Starting off in a fish bowl which was much too small for a big dreamer such as myself, I leapt out, soaring into the sky and landed slap bang in a glass of water. From this point onwards you can use any available liquid to help you traverse the house. You also have the option to splash some of the liquid to make puddles to help you close gaps. But these puddles will dry up after a short period of time, so you need to be quick.

The premise is simple, but the platforming is done surprisingly well—it's challenging without being impossible. At one point I was faced with getting past a working fan. My first attempt was laughably bad as I got caught by the spinning blades and launched across the room, landing on the dry floor and quickly blacking out—that's Finding Nemo's bad ending. But you can't keep this fish down. After reassessing the situation it was immediately clear that I don't have the dexterity to launch myself through the swirling blades, so I had to come up with another way.

On further inspection I found the switch for the fan lying nearby on the floor. After splashing some water down, I made my way to the switch, flopping around until I turned it off. Then I used a nearby water bowl to launch myself back up to where I started on the table.

With the fan turned off, my job was infinitely easier, and instead of trying to jump through the blades, I flopped onto the static fan and then jumped over to a nearby shelf. No mountain is too high, or valley too low for this fish.

The demo was over soon after this point, which was unfortunate as I was really starting to get a hang of playing hacky sacks with a fish's body. But the good news is that we hopefully won't have to wait too long to continue the adventure towards the open sea as Barely Breathing is set to release sometime this year. In the meantime, I'll be heading back into the demo and perfecting my fish trick shots; this fish's owner won't know what hit them by the time the full game releases.

Portal 2 is one of the easiest-to-recommend games in the entire medium, and part of that is down to the custom levels scene it's inspired for over a decade now. There are around a million on the game's Steam Workshop entry alone—and if you've ever tried modding it yourself and chafed at the game's limitations, you'll be pleased to learn about Portal 2: Community Edition, which released into open beta yesterday.

The announcement video is careful to clarify that this isn't a remake or an overhaul of Portal 2's core action or campaign, nor is it a campaign itself. Instead, it's a "community-maintained" build which adds new lighting tech, volumetrics, support for more detailed textures, custom campaign support with built-in UI, expanded scripting capabilities, and an overhaul to the Hammer map editor.

These things are possible thanks to Strata Source, a fork of the CS:GO engine, which P2:CE is built on and was used to make mind-bending Portal 2 mods like Portal: Revolution. You can find a breakdown of the changes in the announcement video, as well as a showcase of what people have done with it so far. The Steam page casually shows a custom level which squeezes all of Portal 1 into a singlemap, so I'm curious to see what modders cook up now that CE is available to everyone.

You can peruse the projects people have already made on the mod's workshop page (not Portal 2's, mind you, but Community Edition's). That includes Half-Life 2 maps now accessible from the custom campaign menu, a gallery of assets recreated with higher quality textures, and an original puzzle called Lesbian Kissing.

There may not be a ton of new playable goodies to pick through just yet, but it sounds like the team behind CE are working on an original campaign to go with the mod itself. Give modders some time, and I'm sure it won't be long before we're seeing custom maps that look like they're from a completely different game.

A common lament among cozy game players is that some games commonly considered "cozy" are more stressful than they let on—lookin' at you Stardew Valley optimizers. But managing your daily energy and getting to bed before 2am has nothing on the overwhelm of looking at a screen filled with thousands of almost identical clovers to find the one four-leaf clover among them. I've only managed to do it twice so far.

One In A Thousand: Clover Book is a cozy, relaxing, shockingly difficult hidden object game that I just couldn't stop staring at the first time I saw it. The way all the clovers bend away from my mouse as if I'm delicately brushing my fingers through a field looking for that four-leaf prize reminds me of the physicality that I found so enticing in things like Potion Craft or Kynseed.

One In A Thousand is a bit of a misnomer. It actually guarantees one four-leaf clover out of 2,500 clovers on screen. That, too, is inaccurate, because the real life rate of four-leaf clovers is about one in 5,000, says solo developer Matteo Silvestro. This unexpectedly challenging cozy game could have been even more difficult, but Silvestro took pity on players.

One In A Thousand started out just a bit easier, with four-leaf clovers occurring at a 1:2000 rate. Silvestro says after doing his research on the real 1:5000 ratio he considered insisting on realism but didn't want to stress players out quite that much.

"I ran a few playtests at various events and people already found it quite difficult at 1:2000," he tells PC Gamer. "I realized that 1:5000 would be realistic, yes, but it would ramp up the difficulty even further, making for a more frustrating experience than I wanted."

Silvestro enjoys looking for clovers in real life, and designed parts of One In A Thousand after his experiences. The journal that logs each of your special clovers is inspired by the one he keeps with his own four-leaf finds. All of the clover patterns are also based on ones he's picked in the wild where he's based in northern Italy.

(Above) Witness me finally finding a four-leaf clover and immediately pretending that I haven't so I can take a clip of myself finding it, but more casually, instead of erratically.

The other important concession Silvestro made is the subtle hints system hidden within One In A Thousand. As you brush through the clovers, you can click on little round shadows to reveal ladybugs hidden beneath the leaves. The color of each ladybug is a "hotter or colder" hint, with redder bugs meaning your four-leaf clover is near at hand.

If you turn the hints system off though, you'll have to use good old grit and some real life clover-spotting techniques, which Silvestro was good enough to lend me his expertise with.

"Instead of going clover by clover, one by one, you start by looking at the full picture," Silvestro says. "Clovers usually have small white patterns on their leaflets. This means that if a clover has three leaflets, the white patterns form a triangular shape, but if it has four, they instead form a square. Our eyes are quite good at spotting patterns! So if you stand back as far as you can and scan the field, you might be able to spot the change in pattern and hence locate a four-leaf clover right away. It's a very effective strategy I discovered while searching for them in real life."

The brave and undaunted cozy gamers among us can go digital clover hunting now by finding One In A Thousand on Steam for $2.

You might want to break out your red flag collection before reading the premise of Mythmatch. It’s a cutesy, irreverent take on Greek mythology (uh oh), full of fetch quests (oh no), and its main hook is that you merge trios of objects together to create new ones. Y’know, just like in all those awful match-three puzzle games that have steadily eroded everything good about mobile gaming. Recommended!

No, seriously, highly recommended. Mythmatch has somehow taken three tired ideas and merged them into my new favorite cosy game. That’s because it’s something of a werewolf. By day it’s a cheerful affair where you hop around an island helping friendly villagers. Then at night it transforms into a brutal puzzler that absolutely despises me. I think I’m in love.

You play as Artemis, who’s currently applying to be the Goddess of the Hunt. She decides to prove her godly prowess with her new ability to magically merge objects together, and the objects she chooses to demonstrate this on are—yikes—three small dogs. Don’t worry, Artemis’ experiment thankfully just spawns a cuddlier take on Cerberus, rather than a remake of the dog scene from The Thing.

Team Artichoke knows you’re going to be spending 99.99999% of the game merging, so have prioritized making it feel fantastic. It’s the little touches that make it sing, like Artemis’ exaggerated hop between tiles and the straining face she pulls as she struggles to heave an object overhead. Then there’s a terrific flash of lightning as it all triumphantly merges together.

Sadly the bureaucracy of Olympus isn’t as impressed with Artemis’ merge power as I am. Her application to be a Goddess is denied by that snivelling worm Hermes, while her lazy brother Apollo has his promotion fast-tracked. Hermes then throws Artemis out of Olympus and into the mortal realm below. Will living amongst these mortals steadily ground Artemis and show her the, er, non-error of her ways? Yeah, probably!

Artemis spends her days taking requests from mortals, usually along the lines of ‘fetch me X so I can build Y’. What saves this from delivery boy tedium is the fun of figuring out the different combinations. Merge three olives and you get a cocktail stick with three olives on it. Merge three of those and you get a jug full of olive oil.

If you thought that chain of logic was a little rusty, oooh boy, strap in. This is a game where you make a bottle of milk by merging three plastic bottles together, with no involvement of a cow in any part of the process (tell your vegan friends!). Merge three bugs together and you get a raccoon. I’m no expert on racoon breeding, but I’m starting to suspect that Team Artichoke aren’t either.

I find these bizarre combinations charming and funny rather than annoying. You're only a dip into a menu screen away from finding out the right answers anyway, but I had much more fun smashing stuff together to see what ridiculous 90s-adventure-game-nonsense answer Mythmatch would throw at me next. Ah, but of course I build an action figure by throwing a raccoon at a garbage bag—in Ancient Greece—then merging the plastic arms the bags drop so they make a plastic leg.

Keep doing these odd jobs for everyone and they’ll steadily open up in conversations. These are very sweet and sincere, often funny, though sometimes a little too ‘ho ho ho we’ve put modern slang where it doesn’t belong lol!’ for my tastes.

Occasionally while merging items a stuffed bear will also drop. Give that to one of the townsfolk and you’ll enjoy a hug with them. Awww! You’d have to have a heart of ice to not find that cute.

Hang on, I absolutely do have a heart of ice, and this is usually the point in the cosy game where I’d run away screaming from such a saccharine lovefest. Luckily whenever things do start getting too twee, night falls and Mythmatch drops the cosy facade completely.

Artemis can ascend to Olympus nightly to prove she’s got the Godly goods in several minigames. The first is a simple match-three affair that quickly escalates into a nightmare. Merge three lumps of mud to make grass, three grass equals a goat, three goats a snake, etc. But you’ve got limited space to work with and the animals keep spawning more grass and mud, rapidly boxing you in. The animals also keep moving around the grid while you’re trying to merge them, the gits. Where’s a goat-sacrificing minigame when you need one?

By the time you’re spawning Medusas, who keep turning things you’re trying to move into stone, you’ll be overwhelmed and screaming at it, the cosiness of the hug you enjoyed mere moments ago a distant memory. Whenever I mess up for the umpteenth time and have to watch Medusa petrify my hopes of besting my high score, I naturally spit blood and consider starting smoking again.

But before I get the chance I’m booted back to the mortal realm, where I’m now far more in the mood for some cosiness. Nothing helps the ol’ blood pressure like successfully merging a pig and then hopping around with it in my arms to track down wishbones. Mythmatch is such a great mix of stress-stress-STRESS and chill gameplay that I’m genuinely going to end this sentence by comparing it to Resident Evil Requiem while almost keeping a straight face.

Flaws? Well whoever thought it was a good idea to include actual baby talk audio in some of the child conversation scenes owes my laptop a new mute key. I kinda like its anti-capitalist message, where the minigames are framed as futile stressful jobs where you’ll never be good enough, whereas the mortal stuff is all about teamwork and friendship and blahdy blah blah. Still, it’s a lot easier to break the loop of being exploited by late-stage capitalism when I can magically merge together whatever resources I need without whipping out my wallet, no?

Oh shut up, me. Nitpicks like that are easy to overlook when I can simply wait for night to fall and indulge in Mythmatch’s brutal side. The second minigame, wherein you’re working in Hephaestus' forge in what’s essentially single-player Overcooked, makes that first minigame look as relaxing as petting a kitten by comparison. You can unlock two animatronic fox helpers in that one, and I’m not proud to admit that I’ve called the semi-useless berks many words that would earn me a lifetime residency in Hades.

Let’s end on some nicer words then. Mythmatch is great and proves that you can be cosy while still offering a meaty challenge. It’s taken the foundations of many a soulless iPhone game and reminded me that such things don’t have to be a force for evil. If that’s not worthy of ascension to Olympus, what is?

Best of all, you can try it for yourself—it has a free demo available on Steam now.

We learn our primary colours pretty early on in life, and from that moment forward they're ingrained into our brains, or so I thought. Because as it turns out I have absolutely no clue what red, yellow, or blue looks like, much less any hues found floating around between them.

The game that's brought on this existential dread is dialed.gg, the colour game that has me looking at everything in a new and mostly confused way. It starts by making the not-so-bold claim that "Humans can't reliably recall colours. This is a simple game to see how good (or bad) you are at it."

Then it starts. You get a few seconds to look at a colour and then it disappears and all you have to do is pick out the exact colour you saw. After you confirm your pick you get to see how close you were to the original colour. My personal best is 9.68, the original colour was H203 S62 B50 and I picked H206 S60 B55, pretty cool, I know.

I had another couple of good runs, with a 9.47 accuracy for a forest green and a 9.45 accuracy for a neon green. I'm good at greens. Unfortunately, I wasn't so skillful with other colours like pinks or reds, with my average score being around 7. Other than the fact that I simply can't tell these colours apart, I initially thought that my biggest issue was with the hue—my brain seemed to be incapable of storing information pertaining to how bright a colour is. You learn something new about yourself every day.

The next step? Not an eye exam, no. Instead, I'm cranking up the difficulty to try the hardest mode on dialed.gg.

Again, I wouldn't say I was awful at this, but on the harder difficulty you don't just get less time to remember the colour but also have a few different colours flash on the screen beforehand, which can be a bit discombobulating.

I've now come to realise that my biggest issue when it comes to remembering colours is that I don't actually know what the original colour is. I'll see something that is clearly a light mossy green and think: "Oh, that's mint green", I'll then pick mint green from memory and it won't be anywhere near to the original colour.

So I see dialed.gg's claim that humans can't remember colours and raise: I'm bad at this game not entirely because of my bad memory, I simply do not know what colours are in the first place.

The older I get, the more I realise that I have many weakness: Cups of tea, cats, and cosy games that make me feel like my life is in order, for starters. I ftear through cosy games like Unpacking and A Little to the Left like it's my last day on Earth. The only problem is, I'm constantly on the hunt for my next cosy game. In walks Organized Inside.

Apart from forcing me to spell like an American, Organized Inside is all about following a little black cat around town cleaning up peoples messes as we go. I cleaned up a pet's store, someone's dorm, a kitchen, and organised a room on a train for a stranger ahead of their next big adventure.

It may seem quite insignificant, but sorting oranges into a box to put into the boot of a car, or vacuum pack-sealing duvets and blankets really is very satisfying.

And the best bit is that you also get more freedom than usual when it comes to organising each level. I applauded the same feature in Hozy recently, that lets you leave each level however you want, as long as it looks tidy. The best thing about this is it means a level doesn't have an exact answer, and you can play it multiple times and get a slightly different outcome for each one of them. I also like comparing notes in games like this, if only to see what twisted ways my friends naturally like to organise their stuff.

Having a little extra freedom in these levels takes the frustration out entirely. I remember a few levels of A Little to the Left that did my head in because I couldn't quite see the exact answer to a puzzle. But here, multiple ways are correct.

Organized Inside isn't particularly groundbreaking, it doesn't have a hugely interesting story and it doesn't tread any new ground, but that's not something I need this game to do. I'm perfectly happy with Organized Inside providing a well built puzzle game that's engaging, rewarding, and has the added benefit of an adorable little cat. That's more than enough for me.

But if you're not yet convinced then go check out Organized Inside's free demo. After playing just 20 minutes of it I was fully convinced that this should be the next cosy game in my Steam library.

Late last year, I wrote about a bizarre moment when game developers suddenly became obsessed with eggs for some reason. Then everybody pointed out all the games about eggs that I didn't mention in the article, as if the goal was to create an exhaustive list of egg-based games and not observe a general trend.

No, I'm not still thinking about that, thank you very much. And I'll let you know that I definitely haven't been obsessively watching Steam for further egg-based games to drop ever since. Anyway, in totally unrelated news, another egg-based game has launched on Steam. This one's from the creator of 2016's weirdest puzzle game, Stephen's Sausage Roll, and for some inexplicable reason is not called Stephen's Egg Roll.

Oeuf is a 3D platformer where you and up to three other pals assume the role of eggs all trying to make their way back home. Between you and safety are a host of platforming challenges which you must use your rolling and jumping skills to overcome. Fall too far from a platform, and you'll shatter your shell, exposing your delicious, gooey innards for any passing ovivore to inhale.

Like Stephen's Sausage Roll, Oeuf looks incredibly simple. But Oeuf's Steam reviews suggest that there are hidden depths beneath its simple, brittle exterior. "You learn something cool with each new level just like you did in Stephen's Sausage Roll," writes Steam user orborborb, while Oversized Weasel calls it a "genuinely phenomenal entry in the rolling object genre of platformers."

Developer increpare estimates that Oeuf will take between four and 10 hours to complete depending on how talented you are at egg manipulation. The game also comes with a level editor and full Steam workshop support, letting you create or play community-based challenges once you've finished the main game.

There's a Steam demo of Oeuf if you want to give it a try, while the full experience costs a very reasonable $10 (£8.50), with a 10% discount until Tuesday. But if Oeuf fails to satisfy your egg cravings, you could also check out the shinier Egging On, or Terry Cavanaugh's Egg (Why not be an egg?), for a similar style of platforming challenges.

For a more esoteric egg experience, there's also the retro arcade blaster Evil Egg and the eerie cooking adventure Arctic Eggs. 2026 is also expected to see the launch of An Eggstremely Hard Game, which folds in a bit of Moving Out to egg-based shenanigans.

Oh to be a little frog waking up from a long sleep over the cold dark winter. Climbing out of your burrow to be met with the fresh sun of Spring and vibrant scent of flowers popping up from the softening earth. It's what dreams are made of, at least it's what mine are made of right now, sat here in dreary England.

I've had enough of the rain, the cold, and the darkness, daylight savings couldn't come sooner. And with it being just weeks away until the sun doesn't set while I'm still sat at my desk I've decided to celebrate the occasion with Walk the Frog, a cosy puzzle game all about welcoming the springtime.

In this game you play as Froggo who is just coming out of hibernation: "All throughout the long, dark winter, he slept deep inside a cosy cave." Me too Froggo, me too. But thanks to still being in a sleepy daze (not helped by his empty stomach) he can't remember the way out of his cave. This is where you come in.

You piece together Froggo's world by slotting puzzle pieces together, drawing him out of his slumber. Along the way you also meet a couple of new friends. There's a rat in a hat who is also lost, and a father stork that can't find his delinquent storklings. You help them, guiding the little rat out of his cave, and searching high and low for the storklings. It's like a puzzle within a puzzle.

After piecing together each of the little storkling's hiding places and returning them to their father, Froggo carried on with his adventure, this time with the goal of getting to his pond just beyond the river in time for the Froggapalooza spring festival.

On the way I encountered a very official dungbeetle, El Duke, and had to lure a cave salamander from its bedroom so I could take a shortcut (with the help of a poo-hungry fly and some little fireflies). But the demo only shows snippets of the game to come, so I left Insect City before I could get to the salamander, but not before I used a huge mass of banana peels to lure some slugs out of a club so El Duke could impress the Duchess of PermaCultura.

I then met a family of moles, dug my way outside the city, and began the next leg of Froggo's journey to the pond and there lay the end of the demo.

Walk the Frog's full release should be coming some time this year, and I personally can't wait. Its cute critters, calm music, and quaint setting is everything I could want in a puzzle game. And the writing and story is so simple and sweet it feels like the perfect game to play just as the days are getting brighter and the rain is easing up.

You're in the woods at night with a couple of your friends looking at a construction crane towering above you, a tantalizing red button at the top, far out of reach. You have no idea what that red button does, but c'mon. It's a red button. You're not going anywhere until you've figured out how to press it.

Throwing things at it doesn't work, so you move onto the next plan: kicking things at it, which doesn't work even more. In the 45-minute preview I got of Big Walk, the "cooperative online walker-talker" from House House, developer of Untitled Goose Game, it was one of my co-op partners who finally cracked the case: instead of using objects to push the button, could we use each other? We could. We picked each other up, and the three of us, standing on each other's shoulders, could now reach the button easily.

I won't reveal what the purpose of pushing that button was—we didn't realize it for a while ourselves—but it was just the first of a half-dozen or so puzzles we encountered in the game's gentle open world. Like the tower, solving these puzzles required exploration, teamwork, lots of communication, and at least one dance party.

OK, the dance party wasn't required, but like everything else in Big Walk, it was a lot of fun anyway.

I played Big Walk in Portland, Oregon, at publisher Panic's office (developer House House is located in Australia and was not present). After getting our bearings in a minimalist tutorial room, my two co-op partners and I (playing with me were The Verge's senior reporter Jay Peters and the Portland Mercury's arts & culture editor Suzette Smith) wandered off into a world filled with trees, hills, rivers, a day-night cycle—and lots of puzzles.

Big Walk has an immediate goofy charm: players look like bipedal ants (in a cute way) with bulbous bodies supported by noodly legs, plus stretchy arms, big round eyes, and squishy noses that wiggle when you speak into your mic. You can run, hop, sit, wave or point each arm independently, and pick stuff up to carry around. We didn't find any backpacks, so we had to lug objects like lamps and radios around in our hands, which often led to a quick discussion about who was going to carry what as we explored the world.

And discussion is critical: all the puzzles of Big Walk are cooperative. (Sorry, hopeful solos, you will need at least one other person to play with.) One puzzle required one of us to hold down a button while someone else interacted with the item it opened. Another needed two of us to simultaneously throw two different switches. One involved a player standing in a locked room that contained the puzzle solution, while the other two, outside the room, had to physically assemble the solution, communicating only by proximity chat through a small window in the wall.

These puzzles were standalone, yet also part of a bigger puzzle: we found a bridge that was inaccessible, and eventually realized solving the rest of the puzzles in the area would let us cross it. There's no real explanations in the world, no big arrows telling you where to go or what to do next: both the individual puzzles and the bridge puzzle were only solved by observing the situation, telling each other what we'd discovered, coming up with ideas together, and trying them out.

I mean this in the best way: Big Walk is a team-building exercise. Having only proximity chat available meant we had to literally stick together, and needing multiple people to interact with every puzzle meant we were all involved and invested. Much as I love solo puzzle games, working with my teammates was a delight and made each success a little sweeter, knowing we'd all contributed. A puff of confetti accompanied the completion of each puzzle, and darn it, it really felt like we'd earned that little celebration.

Big Walk's puzzles will scale depending on how many people you bring with you, too. That button on the crane we tried to reach would have been lower if there had only been two of us and higher if there had been four players. The game will support up to 12 people at once, though puzzles don't scale that high. Four players is the maximum scale for any puzzle, though I can still see the potential of larger groups in Big Walk: maybe splitting into teams for competitive puzzle solving, having races, playing tag or hide and seek, and other free-form fun.

The world isn't just wall-to-wall puzzles, either. We found a station the publishers of Big Walk call "the salon" where you can grab a giant paint brush, use it to poke a color swatch on a wall, and then paint your friends with it, customizing the segments of your blobby little bodies. Even this act of character customization requires cooperation and communication: you can't paint yourself, you need a friend to do it for you.

Near the end of the session we came across an area by the ocean where speakers were broadcasting chill tunes, and after determining it wasn't part of a puzzle, figured it was just a place to vibe, dance, watch the sun set, and relax by the water. The publishers later confirmed it for us: there was nothing to solve there, it's just a space to hang out, and that's exactly what we wound up doing.

Based on the small slice I got to play, Big Walk is nothing but a good time: puzzles to solve, physics objects to interact with, a cute and colorful world to explore or just hang out in with pals. It's a nice foil to the more chaotic and scary friendslop games like Lethal Company and Content Warning. There's no scares and no screams, but it's just as satisfying to make it through a mysterious world by working together.

A few weeks ago I got to play a demo of Big Walk, the open world co-op puzzle game from House House, developer of Untitled Goose Game. It was a good time: a full hour of exploration and puzzle-solving in a quirky and charming world that left me excited to play a lot more.

If you're interested in playing the same demo I did, well, here's some good news: the demo of Big Walk will be available from March 16 to April 19.

The less-good news, at least for most of you? To play it you'll have to visit the office of the game's publisher, Panic. In person. In Portland, Oregon.

So unless you already live there, you're going to need to do some big walking, riding, driving, or flying of your own if you want to try out Big Walk.

It's an unusual way to launch a demo outside of a convention or expo, though if you're local to Portland (or have the time and means to visit it with a few friends), I do quite sincerely recommend it. There's a special Big Walk-themed room at Panic set up for co-op play, with four gaming stations equipped with noise-canceling headphones so you have to use proximity chat, which is an important feature of the game. I enjoyed it, and I bet you will too—you just have to get there.

It may also be your only chance to play the co-op game ahead of its launch. I asked about the possibility of an online demo or an appearance at Steam Next Fest, and the publishers at Panic gave me a pretty strong "I don't think so," citing House House's priority of finishing the game over producing a separate demo for Steam or PlayStation.

If you're a Portland local or such a fervent fan you'd be willing to take a plane, train, or automobile to Panic's headquarters, you'll find all the information you need to sign up for the demo here.

Cooperative physics-platformer Human Fall Flat is one of my favourite back-burner games, something I check in on once every six months or so to see what nonsense has been added, eagerly play through the new levels, and then memory hole the thing until Christmas or whenever. Given how No Brakes Games' goofy wobble 'em up is one of the best-selling games of all time, I imagine the situation is the same for a lot of other people too.

Now is one of those moments where Human Fall Flat pops back into existence for me, as No Brakes Games has released another new map for players to boldly flop through. The Viking themed map will see players navigating a rugged Scandinavian landscape, piloting a longship and using a battering ram to break into a Viking fortress.

The Viking map follows on from last year's freely added maps having slightly more unusual themes, with 2025's map roster including Candyland, a puzzle-heavy test chamber, and a steampunk world. The latest map brings the total number of post-release maps added to Human Fall Flat to 32, with 5,000 unofficial levels available to play on the Steam Workshop.

The Viking addon also continues the trend of bundling crossover tie-ins into the update, letting you explore Human Fall Flat's textureless Norse realm as an extremely pale Dave the Diver. It is slightly odd seeing a boneless Dave waddling around a Viking village. But given the bizarre twists and turns of Mintrocket's own game, I suppose it isn't entirely out there.

Human Fall Flat's Viking map is available now. 2026 was supposedly the year we were due to see Human Fall Flat 2. But there's been virtually no news on the project since it was announced almost three years ago. The sequel is apparently built on a whole new physics engine, which may explain why No Brakes has been so quiet about it since it was revealed.

In the meantime, you can currently grab the original Human Fall Flat for $6 (£4.79), which is 70% off the usual price. As someone who has played countless hours of Human Fall Flat, it's easily worth that with all the additional maps that have been added over the years.

Find My Frogs was one of my favorite games of 2025, a late-year discovery that absolutely charmed me with what I firmly believe is the most chill, hypnotically relaxing gaming experience I've ever had. The sequel, Find My Frogs: Branches, is basically more of the same—a "cozy hidden object game" with hundreds of frogs living their best lives in a hand-drawn woodland village—and that's perfect, because there is literally nothing I would change about the first game except add more.

"Cozy" is an overused term, I think, but I would also say it's not really applicable here, because it's just not adequate. Find My Frogs is more like a slow, deep brain-stem massage: You see the frogs, you feel the frogs, you become the frogs.

And I know, I know, hidden object games aren't especially hip with real gamers, but just like Find My Frogs: Branches transcends cozy—it is the ubercozy—it's also not really a hidden object game.

Most of the frogs in the game aren't really hidden at all, you see: There's a magical village in a great, magical tree, home to hundreds of frogs and other such creatures—toads, mice, bugs, ghosts, pastries (which are not really creatures, but hey, gotta eat), a big non-predatory owl—most of whom are just hanging out, doing whatever. So you expect everything to be cleverly stashed away, but instead, it's a wetland tableau: There's a couple frogs sitting at a bistro table waving at you, there's one parachuting in from somewhere, and there's a bunch of them having a swim: Some frogs are deviously hidden, but the majority are just hanging out and quite a few are literally waving at you.

The other creatures and objects tend to be better camouflaged: Bugs are often found in containers, for instance, and the pastries are quite small and thus tricky to pick out. So there's a bit of challenge to be had, but there are no time limits or penalties for misclicks, and you can use the hint feature as much as you like. Where a lot of hidden object stuff tries to present as more serious adventure games, Find My Frogs: Branches is more akin to the I Commissioned series: Relax, chill out, click on some little animals.

You can even do Find My Frogs ASMR if you like.

Find My Frogs: Branches does a great job with the little details. It's all so goddamn cute, yes, but the ambient soundtrack is utterly entrancing, and zooming in on certain areas of the village will bring gentle, spot-on sound effects to the fore: A ticking clock, splashing water, a quill scratching on paper. The village also passes through a day/night cycle, and the softly illuminated village at nighttime is a real dreamscape—the kind of place a child playing in the back yard on a summer night might imagine lies just beyond the treeline.

There is also more frog buttcrack than you might expect. Just something to be aware of, if you're sensitive to mature content.

I've played a lot of hidden object games over the years, some quite good, a few quite bad, and most a reliable, reasonably satisfying application of a formula aimed squarely at an older demographic that has a little bit of time for videogames, but would never consider themselves gamers. Find My Frogs is probably my all-time favorite, and I expect Find My Frogs: Branches to stand on equal footing.

If you enjoy the genre it's a must-play, and if you're not familiar with the style but have even the slightest curiosity, I'd urge you to give it a go. The Find My Frogs: Branches demo is a short one, probably no more than 15 or 20 minutes to wrap everything up, but it delivers a clear sense of what the game is all about—and it's different enough from what you might expect that you might just end up a fan.

Sam, the grizzled detective protagonist of Obsidian Moon, spends most of his time moving little bits of paper around on his desk and worrying about whether he's got enough money to afford whiskey and beans. As a former magazine editor, I find it all very relatable.

The stakes are a bit more serious in his case, however—if he misses a deadline, it could foul up a murder case or, possibly, unleash cosmic horrors.

Loading up Obsidian Moon's demo, I'm impressed how quickly it draws me into its world. The intro sets the scene with atmospheric music and a few tense conversations about Sam's tenuous position on the force, and then I'm right into an authentically furnished 1930s office to peruse some case files. It all screams noir, and there's just no setting that puts me in the detective mood faster.

Essentially, I'm piecing together the details of a case by reading through reports and taking actions that can then unlock more documents—things like inspecting a piece of evidence, sending a body for an autopsy, or surveilling a suspect. The catch is, everything I do eats up time, and there's only so much in a day.

When a day ends, I've got to pay for the bare essentials of life—you know, things like gas and water bills, tins of beans, and strong booze—and I only get paid when I close a case. So my funds are my ticking clock, and the emphasis is on not just solving each mystery, but doing it quickly and efficiently.

It definitely adds a layer of tension as I piece together the disturbing murder of a man found literally gutted like a fish at the docks. It's a pleasingly free-form system. As I uncover new pieces of evidence, I can analyse them in combination to make further deductions—such as showing a potential murder weapon to a suspect, or taking a note in a foreign language to someone who can translate it.

Sometimes it's almost too freeform—you're free to try pretty much any action with any piece of evidence, but many of them simply won't have any results, which can lead to a lot of frustrating dead ends. The time limit discourages pure trial-and-error, but with so many options in front of you it can feel unavoidable at points. Or maybe I'm just not a very good detective.

In the end, though, I muddle through to a solution—and the interesting thing at the end of the case is that it's very much up to me when we're done. As long as I have evidence pointing to the correct killer, I can close the case. And with whiskey-driven financial ruin hanging over my head, I feel the pressure to get someone behind bars ASAP. But it's clear that I don't have the full story yet, and the game won't simply lay it out for me in a neat little 'Mission Complete!' screen—it's up to me to decide if I want to keep digging.

That's especially intriguing, because of hints at something rather darker going on than just a drug deal gone sour. The murder itself is oddly ritualistic, and my investigations lead me to a shop selling disturbing, inhuman sculptures. How does this all tie in? And if I just put my killer behind bars without getting to the bottom of it, am I turning my eyes away from some greater evil?

This one case is the only one I'm able to play in the demo, so I'll have to wait to see where these secrets lead—but the store page makes no bones about the fact that Obsidian Moon is heading in a decidedly Lovecraftian direction, as well as incorporating influences from "ancient Minoan myth".

Like a gumshoe with a lead, I'm left keen to discover more. The game's clue-finding mechanics could definitely do with some polishing—perhaps a few less dead ends and a bit smoother of an interface for organising and digging through the files—but there are some really promising core ideas here, and if there's one thing I love it's a noir story turned supernatural.

Obsidian Moon is yet to receive a release date, but you can check the demo out for yourself for free now. Beyond that, I guess we'll all just have to stake out the Steam page until the suspect decides to make a move…

When you read the words "From legendary developers Steve Ellis and David Doak" you could be forgiven for assuming that the next words would be "comes a new FPS".

Ellis and Doak were among Free Radical Design's co-founders, giving us the excellent TimeSplitters series, and nearly Star Wars: Battlefront 3, before it was canned and the studio went bankrupt. Before that, they worked at Rare, on games like GoldenEye and Perfect Dark.

But their new game, which you can play now thanks to Steam Next Fest, has nothing to do with any of these illustrious first-person shooters. Instead, Beyond Words is a roguelike take on Scrabble, which sounds quite a bit like Balatro.

This might seem like a weird departure for them, but after their recent experience trying to get an FPS off the ground, it's actually pretty understandable.

In 2021, Free Radical was reformed. It had survived bankruptcy and been acquired by Crytek in 2009, where it was renamed Crytek UK, and then in 2014 it was sold to Deep Silver. The reformed Free Radical continued to be a subsidiary of Deep Silver under Embracer Group, and former members of the team, including Ellis and Doak, returned, specifically to bring back TimeSplitters.

But since Embracer's whole strategy appears to be acquiring old studios and old games, before shutting them down, things didn't exactly work out. Embracer shut down Free Radical in 2023.

Chatting to Time Extension in December last year, Ellis called the experience "soul-crushing" after he had to "lay off the entire staff". And he wasn't eager to go through that again.

"Having been through this twice, I was keen not to jump right into another big team environment. I was also keen to get more hands-on than it was possible to be while running a larger studio, so doing something smaller sounded like fun."

Doak feels the same way: "My best experiences of making games have been working in (relatively) small teams. So that's what we decided to do. I'm too old for all the other shit now."

So they joined forces again to make a much smaller game and developed a few prototypes. Beyond Words was not one of those prototypes, though; it was a fun weekend project for Ellis while the team was working on another project, which ended up convincing everyone to change course

"I enjoy the scope for strategic play," said Ellis. "In other roguelike games that I've played, I find that although they are heavily RNG-driven, the random factors quickly push you to adopt a particular strategy or fail, and your real choices actually diminish as you play for longer.

"With Beyond Words, the board plays a huge role—you’re constantly interacting with the words you’ve already played, planning for future moves and finding new strategies as your run evolves. It feels more open and flexible."

Even if Beyond Words is a success, don't expect their studio, MindFuel Games, to pivot to another big FPS.

"Never say never," said Ellis, "but a return to big shooters is probably unlikely. Shooters require big money. Big money requires external funding. External funding, in my experience, too often leads to random closures. I'm not keen to get back into a situation where I'm asked to build a team, but I can't offer them job security."

Keep an eye out for our Beyond Words impressions later this week. And if you've got a hankering for more word-based roguelikes, we got contributor Abbie Stone to dig through all of them last year to see if any of them could hold a candle to Balatro.

Opus Magnum, a stellar 2017 puzzle game about building alchemical devices, is getting a surprise new DLC campaign.

Opus Magnum: De Re Metallica will release on March 17, and adds three prequel chapters to the game with a total of 17 new puzzles, new cutscenes and music, and new glyphs (machine components). It's "around half the length" of the original campaign, according to developer Zachtronics.

It's a little weird to be citing Zachtronics, never mind talking about a new DLC release from the studio, because it sort of isn't around anymore. But it also sort of is, clearly.

Zachtronics is one of the puzzle game greats—aside from Opus Magnum, which we awarded a 91% in our review, it's known for TIS-100, Infinifactory, SpaceChem, and a bunch of other excellent puzzle and strategy games. A few years ago, however, studio founder Zach Barth declared in a PC Gamer interview that "Zachtronics is over."

Even then it was only kind of over, though, because Barth and others then formed Coincidence, a new studio that has carried on making games, most notably Kaizen: A Factory Story. I suspect that the new entity had something to do with the 2016 acquisition of Zachtronics by Alliance Media Holdings, but whatever the case, the label has been revived for the moment and Opus Magnum: De Re Metallica will be released by Barth and co under the Zachtronics name.

A PR representative for the studio said that "the future of Zachtronics and revisiting and expanding on other titles is unknown at this time."

As for De Re Metallica, it's a prequel that "follows a maverick alchemical researcher named Saverio Daas, who believes he can unlock metallurgical secrets that even the Imperial Academy has not uncovered," says the studio. A price for the DLC hasn't been announced.

If you haven't played it, I heartily recommend Opus Magnum itself. It scratches the same problem-solving itch as bigger factory automation games, but in tightly designed scenarios which have multiple solutions. The goal is not just to solve its mechanical programming challenges, but to solve them more efficiently than your friends, whose results you can see on a leaderboard.

There's more info about Opus Magnum: De Re Metallica on its Steam page.

Nonograms are like Sudoku's chiller cousin: They offer all the satisfaction of doing grid-based number puzzles, but without as much of a risk of encountering combinatorial mathematics. They've evolved in all sorts of delightful directions with permutations like Picross, which rewards you for your square-counting skills with a lovely little picture.

More recently, they've undergone an exciting new evolution: Now nonograms can kill you! CiniCross is a new roguelike that hit Steam this week, and it turns nonograms not into pictures, but into a dungeon crawler—complete with collectible artifacts, class progression, and the thrill of slowly bleeding out because your brain doesn't handle numbers particularly quickly.

I've been doing a healthy amount of that last bit.

A run of CiniCross consists of advancing through a branching dungeon of nonogram encounters with each floor culminating in a boss battle where your number counting is complicated by a Balatro-style modifier. After each successful nonogram completion, you're awarded with randomly-selected artifacts that—and this is a statement I'm excited to finally be able to say—can introduce some wild mechanics into your nonogram strategy.

You might get an orb that reveals a random dud cell after a number of cell completions. You might get a glove that spares you a mistake every 20 moves. You could find a crystal spear that gives you a 3% chance to fill an entire column at once. I don't want to sound like a sensationalist here, but I don't think nonograms have ever had this kind of buildcrafting potential.

Unfortunately, you're also racing against a timer that ticks down during every nonogram. And once your timer runs out, you'll start steadily taking damage. If, hypothetically, you're the kind of person for whom numeric logic puzzles entail a lot of staring at a grid until something finally clicks, you might find your run ending well before you battle your way to a boss showdown. But I wouldn't know that, of course. I can count squares, like, really good.

Roguelike nonogrammetry is a potent combination, but the most exciting feature of CiniCross is its generous inclusion of an in-game clock. I suspect I'm going to be burning a lot of hours in these dungeons, so it's nice to pretend I'll be keeping track of time along the way.

I suppose this does mean the nonograms isn't the cool-headed, laid-back member of the extended number puzzle family anymore, though. On account of all the killing and dying, I mean.

CiniCross is available on Steam now.

In a 2018 report commissioned by French president Emmanuel Macron, Senegalese academic Felwine Sarr and French art historian Bénédicte Savoy assessed that 90% of the tangible cultural heritage of sub-Saharan Africa is held in Western collections—a product of centuries of colonial exploitation.

In the fictional future of Relooted, the heist-planning platformer from South African studio Nyamakop, the nations of the world have finally agreed, through an international restitution treaty, to return those artifacts to the peoples who created them. But thanks to the conveniently specific wording about applying to artifacts on public display, Western museums and private collections have been able to maintain possession of stolen African heritage by keeping it behind closed doors.

Rather than watch the can get kicked further down the road, Relooted's heroes—a former parkour artist, her ex-history professor grandmother, her security expert and perennial nuisance of a brother, and their friends—start stealing it back. The heists are good, but they make for an even better history lesson.

Relooted's proactive repatriation takes place in three phases. First, I scope out the scene with a recon drone and parkour my way onto the premises. Second, after mapping out my target artifacts and the security features protecting them, it turns into a game of inverted Mousetrap, where I tactically wedge tables in the way of security doors, preemptively shatter reinforced glass, and carefully position my fellow art liberators to construct a safe route for my eventual getaway.

Phase three is, of course, when you grab the artifacts in question and run like hell.

Building your exit route is a pleasant enough bit of puzzle-solving, and while a misstep makes Nomali lose more speed than I'd like when the camera doesn't show much of what's ahead during her 2D escape sequences, she moves with a very satisfying sense of momentum as long as I can keep my parkour clean.

It's a competent loop of heist setup and escape execution. But even when I piloted Nomali through a flawless getaway, I found myself more interested in being able to return to the relooters' hideout to learn more about the game's 70 reclaimable artifacts and their very real histories.

In pre-mission briefings and post-repilfering history entries, Relooted illustrates the full breadth and scale of colonial plundering endured by African peoples that's so often rendered through generalization or abstraction.

It tells in real, verifiable terms how sculptures like the Bangwa Queen were claimed by colonial agents as Germany attempted to entrench military control of its colonies in the early 1900s. It traces the provenance of the Asante Gold Mask, currently held in the Wallace Collection in London, to the British Army's looting of the city of Kumasi in 1874. And it allows the reclaiming of the skull of Mangi Meli, who was executed by the colonial government and whose remains, in our current day, have been lost after being sent to Europe for phrenological study.

But even as it recounts the depravities and depredations of the continent's colonial history, Relooted is anything but a bummer. It's refreshingly bright. Its band of self-appointed repatriators aren't joylessly committed to the seriousness of their work, and they don't have the aloof, turtlenecked dispassion of your typical master heisters.

Their outfits are vibrant, splashed with color even during a high stakes break-in at a high security private collection. During between-mission conversations and briefings, their hideout feels lived in and comfortable. They interact with the warmth and familiarity of family members, neighbors, and lifelong friends.

While group dynamics in games are often constrained to lanes of flat hyperproficiency or Whedonesque snark, Relooted's cast has a more grounded camaraderie. It makes their work feel humanizing—as returning what was taken should.

I like puzzle games but I'm not especially good at them, so it's very important to me that any puzzle game I play finds the sweet spot between looking difficult, but not actually being difficult. I love The Talos Principle games, for instance, but I noped out of the third part of the Road to Elysium DLC because it's such a brutal 'eat this, smart guy' from Croteam and my brain just isn't built for that kind of thinking.

I bring this up because Botany Manor sounds very much like my kind of puzzle game—lots going on, but not too intellectually taxing—and it's free right now on the Epic Games Store.

Botany Manor is a cozy first-person puzzle game that casts players as botanist Arabella Greene, who despite her apparent retirement is exploring a Victorian manor in the late 19th century in order to complete her botanical research book. It's got a little bit of a Witness vibe, maybe some Blue Prince, but unlike those games (neither of which I came close to finishing) the goal in this one isn't to make you feel bad for not being smart.

"We have put a lot of thought into this game because it has a very nice peaceful setting," lead developer Laure De May told us in 2024, just ahead of Botany Manor's launch. "We didn't want the puzzles to be too challenging, but obviously also not too simple. I guess the challenge in this game comes from, how many clues there are to find, how many steps there are, how many things to keep in mind, and also how far things are spread out."

That sounds more like my kind of puzzle-game scene, and the reviews on Steam (which we rely on because Epic doesn't do user reviews) bear that out. Even some of the negative reviews are, well, positive: One says it's a "great game for cozy/casual gamers" but warns that if you're looking for something more akin to The Witness, Blue Prince, or Myst—all of which, as I mentioned, Botany Manor kind of superficially resembles—"this is not for you." So, yeah, it's for me!

(I should note for the record that I did finish Myst, and I did it without a guide, because guides hadn't been invented back then. (Okay, fine, they had been invented, but you had to put a lot more effort into getting your hands on them, and in some cases pay like $2 per minute to call a 1-900 hint line, and no I am not making that up.) So I am capable, I just don't have that kind of energy anymore.)

This is the first time Botany Manor has gone free on the Epic Store, so that makes it notable too: There's definitely no chance you've already picked this one up in a previous giveaway. And yes, the Epic launcher sucks, I know, they know, everybody knows, but this year for real it's going to get better. And if it doesn't, hey, there's always Heroic.

Botany Manor, along with the Poison Retro Set for Pixel Gun 3D, is free on the Epic Games Store until February 12.

Little Woody may be the shortest demo I've ever played, but it certainly left me wanting more. My favourite way to cut through the chaos of multiplayer shooters or terrifying horror games is to sprinkle in some light-hearted games, whether they be sims or puzzles, I don't care, as long as it resets my adrenaline.

I stumbled across Little Woody after playing one too many Arc Raiders matches. With a free demo currently available, I thought there was no harm in checking out this 2D point-and-click puzzle game and having a change in pace. The only reason I was wrong in thinking this is actually because I enjoyed it too much, and suddenly reaching the end of the demo enraged me more than a backstab in Arc Raiders could—I was just starting to get into the puzzle-solving groove.

But even if Little Woody's demo may be painfully short, what I played was enough to convince me to wishlist the game and start a countdown for its release.

Waking up in an abandoned test facility, you climb out of a broken test tube and stand on your own two feet, as some strange, walking, thinking, sentient tree. There aren't any directions to tell you what to do, but that's the whole point: you just wander through the facility staring at buttons and half-ripped posters, figuring out what the next best step is.

The biggest puzzle in the demo sees you create a bionic arm to help you open doors, with some water, a half-broken processing line, and maths; it's a lot for a sentient log to do moments after it sprang into existence.

Luckily, this puzzle, like all the others, is relatively straightforward, or at the very least intuitive. Through a process of trial and error, I quickly understood which ratios I needed and what order I needed to sort the machine, making Woody a brand new bionic arm, capable of opening doors, and… waving. Ok, he didn't use it too much afterwards, but opening doors certainly helps progress.

Little Woody's demo certainly ended too soon for me, but that just means I now have the prospect of a longer, relaxing puzzle game to look forward to. There's currently no release date on the Steam page, but it does say the aim is for Q2 this year, which really isn't that long of a wait at all.

I'm only 30, and I often think I'm past my prime. But indie developer Inkle's co-founder Jon Ingold has given me hope. 14 years after the studio's first game Frankenstein hit iOS devices, its latest offering, the WW2-era puzzle game TR-49, is the team's best launch ever. No, literally.

"TR-49 is our best launch, ever, in 14 years," Ingold writes on Bluesky. "I admit I'm surprised! Made in nine months, mostly as an experiment to learn Godot, and an excuse to play with some actors. (And for me to do some acting.)"

TR-49 is a puzzle game where you have to feed books to an old computer to discover a world-changing secret. Ingold was a mathematical consultant on The Imitation Game, the movie about Alan Turing inventing the first computer to break the Enigma code in World War 2, so this seems right up his alley.

The reveal that TR-49 was made in just nine months is very impressive on its own. The fact that it's also the best launch Inkle has ever had makes it even more so. It reminds me of the recent success of Peak, the co-op climber Aggro Crab rustled up in a frantic four-week game jam, refining it in a few short months afterwards alongside Landfall. It sold two million copies in just nine days.

"If we're going to make that a sustainable model we might need to be able to make things a little bit quicker," Ingold continues, claiming that TR-49 can be completed in just four hours and costs $7, so it's a very low commitment for us players. "I love the basic concept of 'compact games,'" he writes. "Particularly for non-publisher indies who have less QA."

As Fallout co-creator Tim Cain said in a recent video, "more of one thing means less of another." If a game has a fixed budget and more features get added, that means there's less time and money for testing and big fixing.

Fortunately, Ingold is excited about making small games. "And the focus," he writes. "I love it as a player and as a dev! One thing, damn well, and done. And people see the end! This is huge for me, personally."

It’s set entirely in a damp crypt. All you do is jam four-digit codes into a machine. It’s got a title only slightly more marketable than 'Mindseye 2: The Randy Pitchford Cut’. And it’s so good that you’re honestly lucky I’m not currently throwing a Steam Deck at you and forcing you to play it.

If those stakes sound severe, they’ve got nothing on what poor Abbi is going through. She’s the unfortunate protagonist of TR-49, stuck in the underbelly of a cathedral with nothing but a mysterious machine for company. At least she’s got it easier than William, the man upstairs keeping watch while also offering occasional advice. Though he’s far more frequently offering pleas to hurry up and use the machine before they get caught by the murderers hunting them down.

Sorry to sideline your boring problems, William, but what a machine! I visited Bletchley Park on a school trip once and got bored, ungrateful millenial cretin that I am. Fortunately, Inkle got inspired instead and has crafted something delightfully esoteric. It’s like a code breaker, library archive, record player, and super-satisfying lever pull rolled into one.

The machine is full of books that have been ‘fed’ into it by its eccentric inventor. Your initial goal is to find a specific book. Unfortunately, just having the book title won’t help you much. You can only search via a four-character keypad, always consisting of two letters and two numbers, which is why they called the game TR-49 (and presumably made their marketing team burst into tears in the process).

Authors have been uploaded by their initials and the year the work was published. So if someone uploaded this review into the machine you’d find it under AS-26. But say the uploader left a note underneath saying “not as bizarre as her positive review of that Pac-Man Metroidvania the year before”. That clue would take you to AS-25 where you’d learn the terrifying truth of how high I overscored Shadow Labyrinth, and perhaps more clues within that.

This is how you track down TR-49’s many, many, many secrets, except puzzles quickly get far tougher. Names can change, publications cease for years due to outside events, and sometimes you even seem to be required to put four letter words into the machine. But that can’t be possible. Can it?

There’s a reason EA doesn't spend millions annually making games where you play as a stressed library archivist, and so far this might sound like a drier experience than eating unbuttered toast in the Sahara. The game avoids this by keeping the tension high. You’re never not aware that you could be discovered by people who want to kill you at any moment.

Then there’s the book extracts you’re sifting through. They’re fun, but the wonderfully bitchy conflicts between the various writers is even better. Writing what you know, Inkle? Each log entry in the machine consists of a paragraph from the uploaded book and some commentary from whoever uploaded it. I particularly enjoyed the series of sci-fi novels that disappear so far up their own arse they could knock out the author’s teeth. The academic journal you’ll find in here writes such devastating takedowns of some of the books (“a symphony of disgrace”) that they’d likely give this game a five, and my review a -90.

When you first discover a log entry, however, you’ll only be able to read the commentary from the person who fed it in. The extract itself is just a useless pile of jumbled-up letters until you match the correct book title with the log entry code. Get it right and Abbi will say the title triumphantly to let you know you’ve got a match. Satisfying, but a little too easy to cheat.

Guessing game

Ever since Obra Dinn revolutionized the detective game, lots of contemporaries have ‘borrowed’ its brilliant system wherein you don’t know if you’re right about something until you’ve put three correct pieces of information in. This stops you from just hammering in guesses until you accidentally stumble across the solution. I was surprised, then, that Inkle has included no such guardrail here. Once I had enough codes and titles, I could easily just keep jamming them in every book title box down the list until Abbi confirmed I’d gotten a hit. “Haha!” I thought smugly “so I am smarter than Inkle!”

Obviously I am not smarter than Inkle. According to this game, I can’t even spell my own name right. Which leaves me scratching my head as to why it would let me game this system so easily. Perhaps because the developer knew it was ultimately meaningless, since I had no hope of solving the game’s true mysteries unless I properly engaged with the texts?

It’s a bit kinder than Obra Dinn and Golden Idol all round, actually, and not just because it lets me indulge my inner cheating scumbag. Look through your notes and the authors you’ve discovered have drawings attached to their files. This turns into a photo when you have found all their work that's in the machine, gently letting you know that your attention is now better spent elsewhere. In their bibliographies, there’ll also be an asterisk next to pages which still have clues for pages that you haven’t unlocked yet. It never holds your hand, but it’s great at giving you a little push in the right direction.

It took me eight hours to reach my first ending, a time that I worry will soon be discovered by the wider world to be absolutely pathetic. But no solution felt unfair and whenever I picked up on another breadcrumb trail of pages following a eureka moment, well, that feeling is basically why I play games in the first place. The writing is fantastic, even by this studio’s absurdly high standards, delivering a tense thriller with constant nasty twists. Just wait until you realise what’s causing the machine’s increasingly frequent glitches.

Audi-oh no

Voice acting is outstanding throughout, with lots of entertaining pomposity from the authors reading their extracts. Even better is the drama happening upstairs. William and Abbi start the game in terrible danger and things only get worse from there. The highlight is when someone very unpleasant indeed starts communicating with you, giving a truly sinister performance as they try to find Abbi’s location and taunt her about how her failure is inevitable. That was a fun voice to hear on Friday night when I still hadn’t solved the mystery and the review deadline was getting closer.

The only flaw with the audio is the music. I like a bit of melancholic piano and strings as much as the next miseryguts, but after several hours of it, I’m listening to ASMR videos of extra-squeaky chalkboards just for some variety. Otherwise, TR-49 is a terrific mystery machine. It was nice of the Bletchley Park folks to help win WW2, but that they inspired Inkle to make this is clearly even better.

After Hours is an Augmented Reality Game, which means its puzzles have to be solved with information from outside the game—mostly from your web browser. One puzzle apparently involves combining Brownsville, New York's zip code with a phone number to find an ISBN code, which leads to a book you need to look at the back cover of on Amazon, all so you can find a password hidden there.

It's pretty tricky stuff. Fortunately, there's a hint system. Unfortunately, that hint system also exists outside the game. If you're stuck in After Hours you're supposed to send an email to Sarah, who is actually an automated Gmail address that will check your message for keywords and then reply with relevant hints.

At least, that's how it should work. As developer Petter Malmehed explained on the gamedev subreddit, a system that worked fine when the game was released has started failing thanks to younger players. "Turns out people don't know how to write emails anymore. The whole message is sent in the subject box, leaving the actual email empty. Because of that, no keywords were found, and no hint message from Sarah was sent out."

To me that sounds like classic boomer behavior. A whole message written in the subject field is how your grandparents send emails. Apparently it's gen alpha behavior too, because a generation who have grown up with instant-messaging and DMs have yet to learn how to write emails. I guess if you organize everything in Discord or WhatsApp, and you don't have a boss or a university professor who relies on it, you just don't use email. File this next to students not knowing what files or folders are.

After Hours is a remake of 128k – A Detective Game, which was originally released on Newgrounds. If you think you can handle alt-tabbing out of a game to open a web browser, and writing emails with correct formatting, you can get it from Steam for free.

As part of Steam Detective Fest, which began on Monday, 2025's GOTY* Blue Prince is currently 34% off, dropping its price to what we in the biz call "a steal" at $19.79 / £16.49.

I am writing this post to inform you, PC gamers who may not have played ingenious puzzle game Blue Prince, about a great deal. It is in no way merely a cover for me to revisit the topic of PC Gamer's official 2025 GOTY vote which I am definitely not still salty about here in 2026.

*According to this very website, Blue Prince is the Best Designed game of 2025. True! But that award reflects that it was the runner-up to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, which narrowly beat it for the top game of the year prize. To that result, I say: "Rigged!!"

Okay, not rigged. But I believe I'll be vindicated by history in declaring this miraculous detective game, designed largely by a single mind over the course of eight years, as the game of 2025.

I fought hard for Blue Prince to get PC Gamer's top GOTY honor, because I really don't think there's anything else like it out there. It contains so many layers of mystery and discovery—puzzles you didn't even know were puzzles for 10 or 20 hours, clues that may only make sense half a dozen discoveries down the line. It's a brainworm, but also meditative, and the very, very rare game mystery that felt rewarding for me to solve through my own thinking and note-taking, rather than being guided to a solution.

You may have heard the RNG in Blue Prince is frustrating, which is probably the main thing that held it back from winning our GOTY award. And that's true, it can be frustrating. But how you deal with the RNG is part of the puzzle of Blue Prince, and if you pay close attention you'll begin to discover more and more things that seemed random that you simply didn't understand yet. Your reward for being a smarty pants is gaining ways to further bend the mansion to your own whim.

January is the perfect month to play Blue Prince: Going outside is unappealing, there aren't yet dynamite new games coming out every single day, and familiarizing yourself with the mansion's rooms as you visit and revisit them until they become intimately familiar is extremely cozy. Yes it'll likely consume your entire month, but what better month to burn than this one? And if you still end up bouncing off the RNG, well, at least you paid 34% less to almost get obsessed with the best game of 2025.

There are loads of other games on sale in the Steam Detective Fest, too. It runs through January 19.

Monument Valley was an award-winning phenomenon on mobile back in 2014 that made its way to PC eventually, as did its sequels and several other games by its developer, Ustwo. That studio has now apparently moved on from mobile-first development, as CEO Maria Sayans recently told Mobile Gamer.

"What has changed more recently is shifting our focus to 'PC first' in our future titles," Sayans said, "rather than mobile first. This stems from a realisation that there is a ceiling to how much you can do on PC and console when you are perceived as a mobile-first game, and that you make compromises both in product design and go-to-market strategies when mobile is your lead platform."

The trigger for this was Monument Valley 3, which initially came out exclusively on Netflix, being removed from the service a mere half a year after launch. "After working with Netflix for a few years developing Monument Valley 3, the game launched in December 2024 with a strong marketing campaign behind it," she said, "and six months later they told us they wanted to take it off the service. A number of games were taken off the service at the same time, so I assume it is related to the evolution of their content strategy and priorities."

So yeah, unsurprising that Ustwo wants to move away from a platform so likely to yank the ground from underneath them without notice. Rather than making games for Netflix and Apple Arcade first and porting them later, the studio wants to make its games multiplatform from the get-go, with launches on PC as step one. "In terms of platform, the shift is that we now think as PC as the base, where we can build more direct relationships with our audience and community," Sayans said.

If, like me, you only know Ustwo for Monument Valley—a pleasant puzzle game about mazes made of Escher-esque optical illusions, with snacky levels well-suited to phones—the studio is also responsible for a surreal turn-based tactics game set inside someone's mind as well as a nature-loving photo safari that's helping the environment in the real world.

Jonathan Blow—that fellow who made Braid and The Witness—revealed his new game at last year's Game Awards. Order of the Sinking Star, in the making for nine years, is pitched as a "game design supercollider" that mashes together four separate puzzle games into an enormous puzzle chimaera, throbbing with 500 hours of hot solving content.

Blow sat down with me to chat about the game before its reveal and, what with him being so inextricably associated with puzzle games as a genre, I asked what he thought of the state of the genre in the modern era. Does he think it's in a good place? Does it seem particularly interesting or innovative to him as a space?

"No, I don't think it is," said Blow. "And I'm not sure why, because I do feel like there are quite a few really good games in the past that people could look at, if they're sitting down and making a puzzle game… there's enough games that have done really interesting things that you should be able to look at them and, really, go from there, but I don't feel like people do."

The way Blow sees it, too many puzzle games focus on pure difficulty at the expense of tying their puzzles into something broader—some kind of overarching theme. "One thing that I used to try to tell people is, 'Look, if you're making a puzzle game—if it's just a difficulty challenge that's not really that interesting, you want it to be about something and you want what it's about to be good."

It's a philosophy visible in Blow's previous games, although perhaps one that's not to every player's taste. The Witness was chock-full of musings from philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and even Buddha. Braid, meanwhile, eventually t-boned players with a quote from Kenneth Bainbridge, one of the developers of the atomic bomb: "Now we are all sons of bitches."

"I just feel like a lot of games are still missing that," continues Blow. "Or, you know, sometimes you can get in this place where the designer sees what they're about, but the player can't really see what what the puzzle is about, because that's a separate design pursuit that you do—designing something is one thing, but then making sure people really see it and get it is a separate dimension of design."

Which isn't to say Blow doesn't have some recent(ish) favourites. "One of the games that very explicitly inspired [Order of the Sinking Star] a little bit, [although] this game isn't like it at all" is none other than Stephen's Sausage Roll. Blow calls it "brutally hard and not very accommodating to the player, but I think it is one of the best puzzle games ever made." He's also spent some time with Trifolium: The Adventures of Gary Pretzelneck. "That was pretty good, because it starts out looking like a normal, boring snake game, but it's actually really interesting." But the odd stand-out aside, it sounds like not much has bowled Blow over recently.

I've loved Katamari ever since I was a kid. The bright colours and quirky yet hilarious characters stuck with me from a young age. The recent release of Once Upon a Katamari in October revitalised this love. Every single second I've spent jumping back into the series and rolling around my Katamari has been memorable, and I feel like many long-term fans of the series have felt the same way. I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that my online ramblings about my love for the series resulted in my social media feeds being filled with Katamari-related content, yet one TikTok in particular stopped me in my tracks: The King of All Cosmos by Cybertsu.

There's nothing more impressive to me than when someone decides to cosplay a somewhat unconventional character, because you can just tell that a lot of thought and effort has gone into bringing their outfit and persona to life. While The King of All Cosmos does have some vaguely human features, it's by no means easy to pull off. Though saying that, I have definitely seen more cosplays of the Prince than I ever have of the King. So, to learn more about why the King of All Cosmos was chosen, and what the process of making a cosplay that reflected all of his charm looked like, I spoke with Cybertsu.

Cosplay is a fairly new endeavour for the creator, but something about the hobby always intrigued them, especially after growing up with anime and gaming. Cybertsu tells me: "I’ve always loved dressing up whenever I got the chance, whether it was going all out for Halloween or wearing simple, low-key cosplays at smaller local conventions like pairing a Red Ranger helmet with casual clothes.

In 2023, my friends and I decided to visit the Dokomi Convention, and it being my first big con, I had an amazing time. Because I already owned a Red Power Ranger helmet, choosing my cosplay was easy, but I also had a whole list of characters I’d been wanting to cosplay for a while. That’s when I decided it was finally time to start working through that list. I had the pleasure of meeting so many wonderful people, including artists, cosplayers and visitors who just wanted to take a picture. It was one of the warmest welcomes I’ve ever experienced."

So it didn't take long for them to become more involved with the cosplay community, and more motivated to create outfits for themself. When asked why she wanted to take on a Katamari cosplay as a self-proclaimed "cosplay newbie", Cybertsu told me that there was one answer: "I love Katamari. I adored the game as a kid, and I had never seen a King of All Cosmos cosplay before, so I just thought, 'Fine, I’ll do it myself.'"

The King of All Cosmos isn't exactly a straightforward cosplay to build from scratch, especially if you're fairly new to the hobby and you haven't built an entire costume before: "If I’m being completely honest, everything was challenging because I wouldn’t consider myself handy, but I do know how to sew a little by hand. The worst part was definitely the headpiece. Figuring out what materials to use and how to put everything together was an experience. Half the time, I had no idea what I was doing, but somehow it all worked out in the best way possible. I’m really proud of it, especially since it’s the first thing I’ve ever built."

It's not just about the outfit and headpiece for the King of All Cosmos either. One thing that particularly interested me when I first found Cybertsu's cosplay online was a handcrafted Katamari that accompanied the look, which had a mass of items meticulously positioned on it to perfectly replicate what you'd create in the game. Since you'll roll up hundreds of different items in Katamari, I wanted to know if there was a reason behind which items had been selected. Cybertsu shared: "My ideas for my Katamari were a mix of things it would pick up from my desk and miniature versions of everyday items like a rubber duck, coins, food boxes and so on, plus rhinestones.

Keep in mind, the rhinestone idea came last, so imagine me trying to place them around everything that was already glued onto the Katamari. It took me three days until everything was glued down, dried and covered in stones. It was a nightmare, but totally worth it. Even today, I still find rhinestones in random places."

It's safe to say that I'm not the only person who is so impressed by the cosplay, either. On one TikTok using the trending audio Promise by Hirose Kohmi (often referred to as the "Geddan" trend), Cybertsu has received over 139K views, and on another featuring a different audio, just over 104K views. Both videos have hundreds of comments admiring the handiwork as well. In response to that, Cybertsu shared: "I still can’t believe how many people have seen and enjoyed my cosplay. When the Geddan video started getting views, I was totally surprised because it had been out for months, and life had just gone on. I really had no idea what was happening. I’m honestly so grateful for such a kind community."

Baba is You is about as cool as puzzle games get, and PC Gamer contributor Philippa Warr agreed, scoring the game an exceptional 90% back when it released. But like most puzzle games, I binged it once with no plans to return until my withering hippocampus had fully lost all the puzzle solutions. To my elation, 2026 is starting with a delightful surprise: a major update to Baba Is You with all sorts of new words, objects and modding tools.

The update is detailed in a Steam community blog post, which reasons "This will most probably be the final large update for BIY." It seems to be primarily targeted at modders, but contains five new words for use in custom levels: become, facedby, hold, happy, and angry.

If you've never played Baba is You, words change the way a given level works as you construct condition-altering sentences. For instance, Baba is Happy would theoretically make the player character happy… what effect that would have on a puzzle, I'm not sure.

There's also a bunch of new sprites, including a fox, a bean, a hot dog, a cactus, and so on. This is all tailor-made for Baba's detailed (and cross-platform!) level editor, which was released back in 2021. If you haven't revisited Baba since then, players have made all sorts of custom levels in the meantime—some of the best ones are accessible from the "featured" section of the game's main menu. Given how mind-bending some of the base game's puzzles are, it's hard to imagine what sort of shenanigans fans have cooked up.

And that's not even mentioning mods, which also got a boost with the new update. The patch notes feature a lot of technical jargon experienced modders will have more luck parsing, but they come with a few dozen bugfixes and tweaks that should make for a more polished experience in general.

It's not stuffed with new levels like some previous free updates for the game—at least, as far as I can tell—but it's nice to see the game introducing new toys to mess around with so many years after its initial release. Baba is You might sear my neurons with its hardest puzzles, but over half a decade on, I've still never played anything quite like it. That's worth celebrating, even in 2026.