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

Brainrack, Issue #363 (Week of April 12, 2026)

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

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

The event of the week is the Steam Medieval Fest, with a few puzzle games on sale, but many other thinky-related categories, like strategy, tower defense, board games, and a few point&click adventures.

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

New Curatees with Full Reviews:

• Suitcase Stories (point&click)

New Curatees with Mini-Reviews:

• ℹ️ A Little Perspective (sokoban)
  
• I Eat Paintings When Guards Aren't Looking (hidden object)
  
• Motorhome: Traveling North America 3 CE (hidden object)
  
• Shapes of Memory: Jigsaw Puzzle (board game)

Please let us know in the Curator Info thread if you'd like to write mini-reviews (max. 200 characters, positive or negative) for puzzlers that aren't curated by us yet. Examples and inspiration can be found on the Group Member Recommendations list.

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

Both Orgynizer[www.steamgifts.com] and PSEUDOKU[www.steamgifts.com] are available only for our group members, courtesy of the developers.


https://testx-steam.c5game.com/steamstore/app/3120030/The_Day_I_Became_a_Bird/

A puzzle adventure, a string of short quests and activities, like petting the dog, eating breakfast, and riding the bicycle. Good looking, charming, varied, with a cute adventure about young love.

https://testx-steam.c5game.com/steamstore/app/2501650/Electrogical/

Now out of Early Access. A puzzle game about building mathematical circuits using jigsaw-like pieces. You must figure out the right way of combining operations to get a specific target number, and while this sounds easy, it gets quite challenging. Sometimes there are many ways the pieces can fit together, but the operations are hard to pin down. Other times, the pieces don’t seem to fit at all. Sometimes there are surprising mechanics you didn’t realize. And on top of all that, there’s a Zach-like optimization aspect when there seem to be too many possible solutions. Can you find the best?

https://testx-steam.c5game.com/steamstore/app/4563780/Infinite_Cat_Theorem/

A mix of puzzles and bullet hell action. The main mechanic is about building circuits to power different kinds of chips by rotating wires and flipping switches. You may need to rewire the same level a bunch of times, gradually unlocking and powering on more elements, until you can reach the level exit. There are also optional chips that permanently “upgrade” you, giving you more HP. Why would you need HP? Because now and then, you encounter enemies that you must dodge or fight, while still solving circuit puzzles. It’s interesting, though the levels are kind of big and not very easy to follow, the graphics could use a high contrast mode for those without perfect eyesight, and the battles do require fast reflexes. I could say it’s a bit boring, but my actions contradict my mind: I couldn’t stop playing it for two whole hours late last night!

https://testx-steam.c5game.com/steamstore/app/2230450/Moses__Plato__Last_Train_to_Clawville/

A detective game in which you are the prime suspect and must find the actual culprit to clear your name. It’s more about the story than puzzles; there are a lot of interrogations, though you do have to be careful about the questions you ask and the evidence you can provide to support your statements. But where the game shines the most is the voice acting and the graphics.

https://testx-steam.c5game.com/steamstore/app/3214190/Shattered_Dimension/

A bizarre adventure from the makers of Isoland. There are several connected screens, each one about a person, like a detective or a doctor, each one with various puzzles. While the screens are separate, you will need items and clues from one screen to another. While some are logic puzzles, some are lateral thinking puzzles, like where the seed can be used, or how you can wake up the worm.

https://testx-steam.c5game.com/steamstore/app/3749330/A_Storied_Life_Tabitha/

A cozy, story-rich puzzle game in which you have to solve small puzzles about the life of Tabitha.

https://testx-steam.c5game.com/steamstore/app/3931650/Switchboard/

A job simulator in the Papers Please style. Operate an old-style (and I mean a really old-style) telephone switchboard, connecting calls between numbers: someone rings, for example, 165, and asks to be connected to 168, so you plug the red cable in the 165 socket and the blue one in the 168 socket. Simple manual labor, that's the core gameplay. But, as the days pass, it gets more complicated: they may ask for a person by name, so you need to look them up in the phone book; they may ask for a business, so you look it up in the businesses index; there are daily special codewords, like “bugs” can be found at 155 and “flowers” can be found at 178; there are numbers outside the range of your switchboard, so you need to figure out how to connect to 403 when you only have 1xx numbers in front of you, and there are special numbers for the military base, and people who aren't clear about what they want, so another aspect of the game is figuring out how to operate the board in more advanced ways, and being fast and precise, and keeping up to date to the daily changes… Another aspect to consider is the intricate political dystopian elements of the story, as the game takes place in a made-up country that has recently emerged from a regional war. You can spy on people and decide when to disconnect them or intentionally refuse their calls.

https://testx-steam.c5game.com/steamstore/app/3962750/Towers_of_Scale/

In essence, a math game disguised as an RPG/dungeon crawler, inspired by Magic Tower / Tactical Nexus. You’re a little hero exploring dungeons, slaying enemies, and gathering items. But instead of managing lots of stats, it’s all about managing your power number. To defeat an enemy, you must have a bigger power number than theirs. After you win, you either add or remove their power from yours. Some doors can be opened with keys, some will halve your power. Some rooms can be opened either with a key or with power. Most enemies are optional, but you may need their bonus to defeat stronger enemies. So, you must choose the best order to attack the enemies or open doors. You can just go blindly into battle, or you can design the perfect route; it’s up to you. Minimalist presentation, 1-bit graphics, lots of math, but also lots of fun.

https://testx-steam.c5game.com/steamstore/app/3628540/Tower_of_Square/

A free pathfinding game about outsmarting enemies. You have to move from one corner of the grid to another, trying not to get eaten by enemies. While you can only move orthogonally, enemies can also move diagonally, so in a straight race, they would always catch you. But the enemies are also quite dumb; they only try to move straight towards you, so they would never move around an obstacle. Learn the exact rules they follow and use them to your advantage. Other mechanics involve enemies that just move in sync with you, enemies that mirror your moves, making enemies eat each other, buttons and spikes, and a few others. It’s a bit basic, but given that it’s free, it’s worth a look.

https://testx-steam.c5game.com/steamstore/app/3097240/UNIVERSAL_WEIRDNESS/

And one more bizarre adventure from the makers of Isoland, though I couldn’t get this to run on my devices.

And the Rest:

• 3D Escape Room: Cursed Legacy (large escape room, hidden object, mystical, first-person): A tap-and-drag escape room clearly inspired by The Room series. Find hidden compartments, solve small mini-puzzles, use the eyepiece to observe a hidden world, and the timepiece to teleport between different time periods. It’s not as good as The Room games, and I spent most of my time hunting for yet another compartment that was only visible from a very specific angle.
  
  
• Butterfly Girl (puzzle, psychological thriller, multiple endings): A very short puzzle about matching colors. After a few solo puzzles in which you learn the basics of mixing colors, you have to work with/against another character to mix the same color, given that you don’t know what colors they have on their end. And after just a handful of these puzzles, depending on which colors you chose, you get one of several (scary) endings. It’s not much, just a few easy puzzles followed by a cutscene.
  
  
• Colorable (pathfinding): Color every tile of the grid. Low quality, unintuitive graphics, random levels, you have to finish both within several moves and within a limited time. Not recommended.
  
  
• Cubetory (factory builder, automation): Giant factory building with configurable difficulty. Paint cubes with different colors on different sides, each pattern being a certain item, like a cube with 4 yellow sides is Nutrient, a cube with 4 green sides is Hydration. You can choose if you want a relaxed, normal, or hard game, each with different throughput constraints. The focus is on scale and optimization, not on puzzles, so it’s more or less busy work.
  
  
• LinkMaster (numberlink, logic): A basic numberlink, connect each pair of nodes of the same tile with a line, covering all the grid. Levels from 4x4 to 14x14, but not that good: easy puzzles, multiple solutions, a lot of winding around just to cover all the tiles, star rating based on how fast you solve the level, a single, small, fixed window size with no fullscreen option, mouse only controls, drawing a line often fails so meeting the required 3* time is mostly about being lucky enough for the game to correctly follow the path you’re drawing. Not recommended.
  
  
• Medetashi Medetashi (visual novel, puzzle adventure): A kind of visual novel with puzzle elements, choose your actions when interacting with other characters to influence what happens next, then solve some puzzles to get to the next interaction. I couldn’t play too much of it, since the puzzles weren’t that interesting, and I don’t like visual novels.
  
  
• Nekokami - The Human Restoration Project (world building, tiling): Now out of Early Access. An Islanders-like, place tiles in a hexagonal grid to rebuild the world.
  
  
• Portal 2: Community Edition (mod): A new (and free) mod for Portal 2, not about new puzzles, but about improving the puzzle-making aspect.
  
  
• Reliquare (first person, sudoku): An open world puzzler much like The Witness, but instead of strange logic grids with unexplained rules, all the puzzles are variants of Sudoku.
  
  
• Soko Pirates (Sokoban, logic): Mostly a reskin of Microban levels, as a showcase of the developers’ ability to do nice pixel graphics. But the 9 “master” levels are quite challenging. Decent quality, just don’t expect a lot of puzzles.
  
  
• Stoplights (factory builder, train tycoon): A mixture of factory building, strategy/board game, and train simulation. Build train tracks to transport resources between places, turning base materials into more and more complex resources.
  
  
• Wyred (sokoban, pathfinding): A sokoban in which you are not allowed to move over the same tile more than once.

And a heads up for the games covered in the next newsletter: Causal Loop, an excellent test-chambers game with timelooped clones of yourself; Titanium Court, a surreal game defying genres set in the land of faeries; Factory 95, the factory builder game in which you build PowerPoint slides; Whispers of the Hourglass, an open world escape room with time travel and poetry; Wordban, a sokoban with words; and Bart Bonte is back with a new Factory Balls game, Factory Balls Go!


The Demo of the Week is Hopping Out, but since I already mentioned it a few weeks ago without a description, and it’s been a while since I last did demo reviews, also check out Snect, if you’re looking for a challenge, or The Cleaner, if you want something more cozy.

• 👍 Beneath the Ghost Kingdom (puzzle platformer, story-rich, metroidvania): A very rich puzzle platformer in all aspects: graphics, audio, story, mechanics, puzzles! As a puzzle metroidvania, you’ll have to keep exploring the map, and for multiple reasons: you unlocked a gate in another part of the screen, or you obtained a new power, or even because it’s a different time of the day. Yes, there’s an in-game clock, and the kids are only playing during the day; the farmer brings the cow grazing only in certain conditions. There are pathfinding puzzles, but also lateral thinking puzzles, like how can you get the giant frog to move away from the exit?. It’s lovely, though towards the end of my recording, it did start to be more demanding in the precision platforming aspect. It might deserve a 🎉, but I’m not good enough at platformers to properly judge it. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 👍 Black Zen White (puzzle platformer, physics): A puzzle platformer with gravity in which the actual level flips between two slightly different states. The goal is to traverse the level from one point to another, but every few seconds, the world switches between a white layout and a black layout. You have a clock to help you time things, and you will have to perfectly time your jumps to go from one disappearing platform to one that wasn’t there before. The main thing I don’t like about it is that you don’t know what the flip layout is, so at least once you will have to fail just to get an idea of what will disappear and what will appear, and even after that, you will have to memorize where it’s safe to stay and where do you have to blindly jump to. Still, it’s good. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 😐 Buccaneer's Booty (sokoban): A pirate-themed Sokoban with boxes, cannons, and buried treasure. A short demo, and at an early stage of development, it lacks undo, and the camera isn’t always where it should be, but it shows promise. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 🎉 The Cleaner (nature, cozy, rhythm, educational, wordless): A very beautiful game about a little bird helping animals. Each level is about a different animal, and while the demo only has two, these are very different levels. The first one is the crocodile, and the goal is to help clean the teeth of this dangerous animal. Each level is split into three difficulties. The first one is very explicit, you see and hear which teeth are sensitive and which aren’t, the second one allows you fewer mistakes, and the third one only has audio clues and doesn’t let you make mistakes. The second one is the turtle, and it’s a song game; you must follow the prompts and push the two buttons at the right time. I’m not good at this type of game, but I still aced the 3 sub-levels, so it’s gentle enough for most people. Overall, the game looks and sounds lovely, but it does rely a lot on sound, so it’s not possible to play it on mute or if you have difficulty hearing. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 🎉 Contact Protocol (job simulator, papers please like, psychological thriller): There’s a deadly uprising in the (space) colonies. There are rumors spreading about ships being destroyed and enemy vessels pretending to be friendly. So, protocols are being tightened. Every time you encounter a ship, you must decide whether to let it pass or destroy it, but time isn’t on your side, since arming and firing torpedoes takes a while, and you don’t want to deal with the bureaucratic aftermath of a wrongly armed torpedo, or worse, a wrongly destroyed ship. So, be quick in requesting and verifying all the required identification. Each day, the requirements grow longer, the rumors keep piling up, and the encounters get more tense. Whom can you trust? Is that little message you were asked to pass on just a friendly prank or a deadly mark? I like this, among the many unsuccessful Papers Please clones, this one seems like a success, doing something special, with meaningfully different mechanics, an engaging story, and high-stakes deductions. The demo doesn’t go too deep, but it teases some clever mechanics. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 👍 Décalcomanie (puzzle platformer, level builder, arts&crafts): A platformer game in which you have to guide a little dinosaur to collect a star and reach the exit. But the level isn’t built yet! You must paint the platforms in, but using just a few dabs followed by the paint & fold technique. So you make a dab in a corner, fold the paper horizontally to copy that on the other side, then dab a few more spots, fold vertically, then push play and jump through the level. Cute, though quite challenging if you’re going for the best score. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 🎉 Deductopia (detective, scene investigation): Updated demo combining all the previously released chapters: Scout Camp, Hill and Dale, and Bring Your Pet To School. This is a detective game in the Golden Idol style, inspect scenes to identify people and their belongings or activities. Well done, not too hard but not too easy, and scenarios that are suitable for all ages, no crimes involved. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 👍 Forgotten Fluff (point&click escape room, spooky): A point&click escape room adventure in the Rusty Lake style, with the same type of controls, same creepy atmosphere, creepy anthropomorphic animal characters, and similar strange puzzles. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 🎉 Hopping Out (pathfinding): Help a hopping frog eat all the flies. There are several mechanics to discover, but the main one is that the frog normally hops two tiles at once, so the difficulty lies mainly in managing the parity, whether you are on odd or even rows/columns. Use boxes and walls to stop early, hop over mushrooms to jump even further, slide on mud, use your sticky tongue to move boxes, push buttons, ride butterflies, catch moving lily pads, and many other mechanics. This is a really good puzzle game with lots of emergent mechanics used in clever levels, and the demo is very generous with many levels. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 👍 Infinite Cat Theorem (logic, maze, bullet hell, story rich): See the description above in the list of releases. (part 1 and part 2 of my demo playthrough)
  
  
• 👍 Kwartikum (sokoban, pathfinding): A kind of sokoban with different types of boxes to push, and other powers you can use. The goal in each level is to collect 3 keys, then reach the exit. Boxes don’t really have to moved on targets, like in classic Sokoban, they are usually obstacles in the way or tools you can use. But not all boxes are the same. Some can be freely pushed, even more than one at a time, others are heavier and can only be pushed directly, others are treasure chests and can hold powers like the ability to pull, and others I’m not really sure what they do. The mechanics and puzzles seem good, but I dislike that while it’s technically on a grid, the character moves pixel by pixel, and so do the boxes, and that slows down the movement a lot. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 😐 Mingle (time attack, hidden object): Find and hug your doppelgangers in a sea of quirky characters. In each level you have to find the one other character that looks just like you, catch it, and merge with it to take the shape of the next character you need to find. Repeat until only one remains. But you have to do this very quickly to get all 3 stars. Each level can be played many times, each win ending with a different character, and you get a short funny description about it. And each level is slightly different, in one the characters are randomly moving slowly, in one they move in a fast conga line, in one merging causes a big ink splatter to cover the screen, making it harder to see the remaining characters, and so on. It’s a fun timewaster, though personally I think the time pressure is too much. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 🎉 Quackoban (sokoban, maximalist): A maximalist sokoban with lots of mechanics. Some boxes stick together, some unidirectionally copy the moves of their pair, some only move when they are in a group of a certain size, plus portals and shape spinning, the short demo showcases a lot of things. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 🎉 Snect (pathfinding, sokoban): A very challenging snake/sokoban with a lot of interesting mechanics. While there is a head, the part of the snake that actually matters, the rest of the avatar doesn’t really follow the classic Snake mechanics. You don’t eat apples to grow; blocks get attached to you as you get near them so that you can have the head in the middle, a branching body, gaps in the middle… Then, some connections between body parts are flexible; they can freely bend as you move, but some are rigid, and the whole part moves as one. You can have a huge group of blocks all moving at once, jumping around you as you turn. Then there are different colors of the body parts, and in order to win, you must perfectly match the shape and color of each target tile. And you can also combine colors, if they are different, or annihilate body parts if you try to mix two of the same color. Then there are cutters, which you can use to detach body parts, but be careful not to push sideways into them, or they will destroy that part. It’s really challenging and quite well done. (my playthrough)
  
  
• 👍 TRIZ | Triangular Dreaming (logic, visual, pattern reproduction): A visual logic game in which you must reproduce a target image. There’s a collection of points, with some fixed, some movable, and some subsets of 3 nodes that make a triangle of a certain color. You can spin around some points, with the triangles they form also re-adjusting, and you must do that until all the triangles are in the right places. It starts easily, but gets complicated quickly, and you need both a good eye for colors and a good sense of how connected things move together to solve it. While it’s not my favorite genre, I like occasionally playing visual games like I Love Hue or Factory Balls, and TRIZ doesn’t disappoint. (my playthrough)

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

Free Game Highlights:

• Locks 'n' Leaps (platformer)
  
• Mesudoku (logic)
  
• Super Scoundrel Solitaire (card game)
  
• Tessel Run (platformer)

Paid Games - Now Free:

• Caveman Caravan (strategy)

New Content:

DragonMirroreD with Hyoga & Magma got 50 more levels.

Highlighting a short and free puzzle game every week!

A game with hidden rules. Each week you have to solve a logic grid while also deducing the hidden rules. Each solve attempt will tell you which of the four rules are respected by your solutions, and which aren’t. Try different solutions, try to figure out what the rules are, then try to actually solve the puzzle. Works in a browser, even on a phone.

Highlighting another free puzzle game every week!

A roguelite logic game with a story. Trapped in a dungeon full of dice, try to make your way out. Starting with a few tutorials, explaining the rules of the dice, you slowly gain the ability to forge new dice with new rules. Some just like to have a specific number of neighbors, some want no neighbors at all, some affect their neighbors, and so on. But dice can also be split, with different halves having different rules. The goal is to place them in a grid so that all the dice are happy. Once you escape your tutorial room, you have to survive long runs within a limited time, so you have to be quick. In each run you get to choose what kind of dice you prefer to have, making it easier or harder to survive the run. But on top of this puzzle solving, there are “collectibles”, you have to try to make every combination of dice, so choosing the same easy path means that you won’t get a chance at forging most of the dice combinations. It’s a good logic game, and the roguelite framing works, I just wish the time pressure wasn’t there. Works in a browser, but not on a phone.

Here are a few quick & easy ways you can help us out. A little can go a long way; otherwise, we'll never achieve world domination.

• Feedback is important, so let us know what you like or don't like.
  
• Follow our curator and get notified about new additions and reviews.
  
• Tell your puzzle- and/or adventure-loving friends and your favorite developers about us and our Basic Functionality and Accessibility Guide.