PLAY REVIEWS. PERSPECTIVES. INTERVIEWS. AND SOME NUMBERS
PUZZLE SPECIAL
Konkan Coast Pirate Solutions PC During production of E383 we were treated to the Thinkathon: a week-long initiative from the Thinky Games community highlighting six newly released puzzle games including the three featured here alongside the music mazes of Rytmos, selfexplanatory hybrid SokoChess White, and the first part of Bonfire Peaks expansion Lost Memories. This head-scratcher positions you as a member of an organisation set up to simulate the movements of buccaneer and merchant vessels. On a gridded board you place icons (turn left, turn right, stop) to guide these galleons, discovering new mechanics as the sim plays out – such as the ability to swap icons by placing them aboard a ship before they set off to their habit of following one another when in close proximity. It’s compact, soothing and rather moreish.
Alephant PC Lucas Le Slo’s game centres on the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph: usually silent, when combined with vowels it produces a sound. Around this idea Le Slo has built a series of Sokoban-style challenges, whose opaque rules are steadily teased out as your pachyderm avatar pushes letters around to connect them. An early stage might see you fuse aleph with a vowel to make a sound, turning a letter elsewhere toward it so that it doesn’t bond with another until you need it to. Linked letters can also be used to push others, while later letters have unique properties, such as warping you across the level. Deeply clever stuff – and its minimalist stylings mean it’s as handsome a beast as its tusked protagonist.
Stuffo The Puzzle Bot PC From Finnish indie developer Antti Tiihonen (Noita, Legend Of Grimrock), this satisfying pixel-art puzzler features a string of deceptively simple-looking stages in which your goal is to guide a robot to the exit, fetching and carrying blocks to use as steps that can only be placed in certain spots. It steadily introduces new ingredients (teleporters, switches, pistons, blocks that spray water), each new stage combining and remixing them to quietly ingenious effect, while setting you a more challenging side goal of collecting hard-to-reach atoms. It’s gorgeously presented, each stage reflected in a pixel sea from which it surfaces at the start – an animation so satisfying that it serves as a fitting reward for completing the previous level.