One More Go

Over the last couple of months I’ve been working my way through some new puzzles games, well, new to me, and I wanted to call out the ones that I’ve enjoyed the most. Puzzle games are such a varied bunch, and often you’ll find a game so novel or unique that it’s difficult to find anything similar for many years. There’s certainly some of that in the games below, but sometimes, after enough time has passed, you’ll see a recreation or an homage, an attempt to carry the torch of the excellent games of yesteryear, and there’s some of that captured here too. Particularly in the first game I want to highlight, Taiji.

Taiji

Taiji is a puzzle game that has clearly been inspired by The Witness, but rather than drawing lines on a grid, here you’re activating or deactivating segments to align with Taiji‘s various rules. As in The Witness rules are introduced by area, and many of the game’s solutions and hidden depths can be found in the environmental clues of Taiji‘s beautifully pixelated world. While I am a fan of Taiji‘s clean aesthetic, I’m not sure the translation into 2D is wholly successful. A large part of The Witness’ charm was its meticulously designed island, and the joy of exploring it in first person. It felt like a grounded space, and the act of craning and strafing the camera as you searched for secrets hidden in plain sight, gave the island a sense of place that goes missing when the world is viewed only from above.

It also apes the way that rules are introduced, a series of panels that start very simple and grow in complexity until the puzzles are easily readable. Except, for whatever reason in Taiji I found myself getting stuck on these instructive panels, often having to look back at previous solutions to work out what I had misunderstood, and whether there were other solutions. I would eventually work them out, but they felt a little more unintuitive, and a stumbling block in an otherwise smooth experience. Comparing Taiji to what is probably still the best puzzle game ever made is a tough break, but, if you enjoyed The Witness, then you’ll no doubt find plenty to love here. It’s a beautiful game filled with complex challenges and hidden secrets that is more than worthy of your time.

Superliminal

Superliminal is a short but wild game. Starting with a series of trad testing chambers where players are tutorialised in how to manage Superliminal‘s core mechanic of resizing objects using perspective. That is, pick up something large like the chess piece above, aim the camera towards the floor, release it and you’re left with a chess piece half the size, simple. Early challenges will see you creating makeshift stairs out of identical toy blocks or creating an enormous ramp out of a slice of cheese, but as you delve deeper into Superliminal‘s dream therapy narrative, the developers soon start playing with other optical illusions, twisting its repeating objects and imagery to fool players and upend their expectations. To say much more would be to rob players of a novel and surprising experience, but if you want a fun, twisty, perspective bending game, then look no further than Superliminal.

Patrick’s Parabox

Of the games on this list, Patrick’s Parabox is easily the one best equipped to turn your brain into goo. Each stage has an outline where the player must end, and others where boxes must be placed. The twist is that some boxes contain whole new layouts, or even more confoundingly, a duplicate of the stage you’re currently in. Like looking into a picture of a picture, Patrick’s Parabox asks players to navigate up and down the various layers to rearrange the boxes on screen. Something that is probably best understood by watching the game in motion.

Patrick’s Parabox spares no time in playing with the formula, some boxes will create clones, some tiles will create mirror images, some tiles can be possessed, and on, and on. The sheer number of ideas that Patrick Traynor, the game’s solo developer, is able to wring out of its central mechanic is astounding, but what’s most impressive about Patrick’s Parabox is, despite how cumbersome it can be to explain, the game itself is easily readable. It feels natural to experiment and solve each stage, reaching a flow state as you read and interact with the game through its own visual language, sometimes feeling dumbfounded as to how you arrived at the solution after the fact. Patrick’s Parabox is an act of hypnosis, melting away time as you fall deeper and deeper into its nested puzzles.