Hollow Ponds, Richard Hogg; Finji; PC, Mac Fill the walls of your nice big empty house with pictures delivered – in pieces – by your friendly local postwoman Wilmot the anthropomorphic square has a curious but not exactly undesirable existence. He resides in a spacious, empty house to which his friendly local postwoman, Sam, brings regular deliveries of tiled puzzles; a subscription that never seems to expire. Wilmot unpacks each new delivery, scattering the pieces on the bare floor. Then he can shunt, grasp and rotate each fragment to form a coherent picture – each of which has been drawn by British illustrator Richard Hogg. Matching pieces snap together pleasingly, and when the artwork is complete it can be hung on Wilmot’s big empty walls. As soon as one puzzle is finished, Sam arrives with the next, and soon enough Wilmot’s wall is as cluttered and colourful as a Saatchi gallery. There are, typically, several fragments left over when you complete a picture, so some of the challenge is in identifying these rogue pieces, setting them to one side (you are free to organise your floor space to suit your organisational requirements) to return to once you have all the necessary components. In time you’ll have several puzzles on the go at once, each one at a different level of completion, and it’s this arrhythmia that gives the game its unique feel, elevating it beyond a mere digital jigsaw simulator. Continue reading...

Launched in 2012, the tile-matching puzzler quickly became ubiquitous on phones. More than 10 years later, 200 million people are still playing. Why? A lot of us were, at one point, in love with our smartphones. In the early days of Android and iPhone, apps seemed designed to delight; throw a few quid at the app store in 2010 and you could be playing some cute game, often involving birds, or messing around with a lightsaber within minutes. Social media apps designed for phones let us post artfully casual photos in a few taps, for our friends to drop hearts on. It was fun, once. But over time, it’s become a toxic relationship. The fun got sucked out of everything. Social media morphed into a hellscape designed to ensnare and enrage us, providing just enough of our friends’ posts to prevent us from actually quitting the platform but prioritising their own ads and algorithmic videos. Twitter used to be jokes and cat memes and now it’s … well, it’s X, and I know I’m not the only one who’s deleted it off their phone entirely. The experience of using apps, phones and the internet more generally has significantly degraded – and the same can be said for mobile games, most of which now give you about 83 seconds of entertainment before trying to extort you for a £7.99 monthly subscription or showing you misleading ads that are so fascinatingly terrible you can’t look away. Continue reading...

PC, PS4/5, Switch; Coal Supper/Panic In this brilliantly surreal, slapstick cartoon puzzler set in a fictitious northern town, you (a junior salesman) help an array of weird characters with odd jobs It is a classic British comedy setup. An unknown junior salesman at a large firm is sent on a seemingly mundane trip to an idiosyncratic town – and chaos ensues. Right from the beginning, this wonderful game from tiny studio Coal Supper makes it clear it is going to load this premise with as much slapstick and surrealism as possible. When it’s time to leave the opening sequence, set in a tenth-storey office, the player is forced to do so via the window, their fall broken by the very bus they need to catch for their journey. When you reach the fictitious Northern English town of Barnsworth, a grim reincarnation of early 1980s Barnsley, you’re supposed to be meeting the mayor but he’s busy, so out on to the streets you go. Here you discover a menagerie of weird characters, drawn in queasily bright colours and a deceptively childlike style, usually greeting you with the words “thank goodness you’re here” before coralling you to help them with a ridiculous crisis. This might be a portly gentlemen who has got his arm stuck in a drain, or a chip shop owner whose fryer is broken, or a senile admiral who needs you to collect his gulls. But wherever you go – through market places, across rooftops, or down ginnels – you will meet more oddballs with odd jobs, as the world’s weird logic and spiralling geography trap you into servile confusion. You wanted to play a cross between a Flann O’Brien novel and an episode of Dick and Dom in da Bungalow? You’ve got it. Continue reading...

This cutesy and surprisingly intuitive brain teaser pushes the idea of the sliding-block puzzle to the very limits For Jemma, her whole life feels like a puzzle. Left on a stranger’s doorstep as a baby, she has never felt as if she fitted in, and is desperate to see what the world looks like outside her small town, which nobody ever leaves. More pertinently, whenever she moves, the whole world moves along with her – like sliding tiles, like a series of conveyor belts. It really is a puzzle getting her from A to B. Each scene in Arranger: A Role Puzzling Adventure is its own sliding-block puzzle, where you must think two or three steps ahead to move Jemma and the objects around her in the right directions. Some things, such as rocks and robot birds covered in purple static, don’t move alongside her, but everything else does. So you have to transport swords towards monsters that stand in the way, keys towards doors, bananas towards shy orangutans. Unless her way is blocked, when Jemma hits the end of a vertical or horizontal row she rematerialises at the other end, adding another layer of spatial logic. Continue reading...