Kicking off the stream's 2nd anniversary week with:
🐛 Word worm (by Noble Steed Games) + 🗝️ giveaway!
🚅 Cipher zero (by Zapdot)
*and new starting times.

See you LIVE on YouTube❤️+💜Twitch
#puzzlegame #indiegame #wordworm #cipherzero

【Game Log: Post-July 2025】


Tried a lot of stuff out, with reasonable success.

Major Timesinks and Finished Games

Wheel World is the most recent game from Messhof. It's an open-world cyclic games where you ride around an island finding random bike parts and challenging riders to races. The cycling is immediately intuitive and great fun. But beyond the first tutorial area, everything about it becomes frustrating. The races are simultaneously unchallenging and annoying. There's a second area that ultimately requires need 100% of every side-objective to finish. And the bike-modifying mechanic is completely irrelevant because there's always a best option from beating boss races.

I got most of the way through Cipher Zero. The puzzle's difficulty ramps up in a reasonably satisfying way towards the end. But ultimately suffers from eternally being stuck on one puzzle with no other options.

Mashina is the latest game from the creators of Judero. It's a charming claymation game about the titular Mashina and her friends. Mashina digs through a 2D cave for minerals and fun items for her chums. There's no real story, but there's a lot of fun interactions between the characters. There's also a great soundtrack in the form of FM radio stations, which have their own associated host drama.

Strange Jigsaws is the follow up to 20 Small Mazes. It's a collection of wacky puzzles that vaguely resemble Jigsaws. There's a great sense of humour and originality to the puzzles and "story" of the game. It does suffer from the occasional obtuse puzzle, and frequently these are chokepoints in the game (unlike 20 Small Mazes). But there is also a provided walkthrough if you really get stuck. Despite its flaws I had a fantastic time.

Is This Seat Taken? is a Wholesome Games (tm) pty ltd LLC patent pending Donut Steal, puzzle game about arranging characters in seats based on their preferences. It's a fairly solid game, and frequently the puzzles are fairly satisfying. But there's also a lot of ambiguous language and ridiculous assumptions in the game that are just frustrating (Hungry and Thirsty are treated as synonyms, characters that "want to look out the window" will happily sit with their backs to it). Unlike with Strange Jigsaws, there's something about it that makes every minor bug intolerable.

Still playing a lot of OpenTTD. Changing the cargo distribution from "default" to "assymetric" makes the passengers in the game have a specific destination, rather than happily be distributed anywhere. It makes the game much more interesting, but much harder.

Tried Out, Revisited Briefly, or Viscerally Hated

The Necromancer's Tale is a stat-heavy CRPG with a loooong statbuilding intro, about the son of a military hero returning home to investigate his death. It is rough around the edges and held together by string. But I've enjoyed it a lot. I've put it down for the short-term due to near daily bugfix patches.

Complex 629 is a top-down adventure/mystery/puzzle game set in a haunted apartment complex in winter. It is highly weird, every conversation is deranged, and there's a giant grandfather crawling the halls. The protagonist has two mouse controlled limbs to pick up things and throw with. Looking forward to playing more.

Brigand: Oaxaca an ambitious and very low-fi FPS RPG mostly from a single developer. I built vagabond character who could charm and seduce characters into doing their will. Then I struck a gas tank with an axe and died.

July Game of the Month

The Drifter, one of the best Australian games ever, and a fantastic adventure game thriller.

All Games Played


OpenTTD: GREAT


Automobolista 2: Good


RAMP 2025: GREAT (Notable)


Cipher Zero: Good


The Necromancer's Tale: Good


Wheel World: OK


Complex 629: Good


Mashina: GREAT (Notable)


Strange Jigsaws: Good


Brigand - Oaxaca: Good


Is This Seat Taken?: OK

"CIPHER ZERO"
A Minimalist Puzzle Adventure.
Watch my quick review!

#CipherZero #Puzzle #RuleDiscovery #LogicGame #Medidative #gem #Indie #gaming #videogaming #videogames

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxPGtdCSV7A

【Game Log: Mid-July 2025】


Back from a trip visiting family. I played quite a few games, and even enjoyed a few of them. And hated a number of mediocre puzzle games.

Major Timesinks and Finished Games

Everdeep Aurora is a mystery filled platformer where you play a cat who has lost her mother and has to dig underground with a drill to avoid a meteor shower. Underneath there are all sorts of set-pieces, weird NPCs, and hidden secrets. A lot of fun and great atmosphere. Looking forward to more of this.

Many Nights a Whisper is the most recent Deconstructeam game. A very short game about an individual who has to train and prepare for a one-off ritual with the potential to grant wishes. Whily stylistically interesting, and with the occasional touching moment. I generally found it meaningless and hollow. I mentally checked out when the game decided to lecture the protagonist for planning to grant love wishes, after I made the conscious choice to accept all but those wishing for the love of others. Also one of the weird games where controllers get inverted Y axis but mouse and keyboard players don't.

Sultan's Game is an RPG based around a fictional sin-themed card game. It is a world of inventory/"card" and diceroll based set pieces. The game has quite a variety of incidents, though they all seem to happen in the same order every game. Similarly the tutorial where you play as the titular sultan is quite spectacular with lots of "Wow! they really went there" moments when one chooses non-standard options, but those become eye-rolling repetition when "they really went there" for the 62nd time. Overall a game that starts spectacularly, but is revealed to be a mile wide and inch deep.

I had a lot of fun with Paquerette Down the Bunburrows. A tile-based puzzle game where you have to corner your escaped pet bunnies to recapture them. The puzzles are hard without becoming too frustrating. Though the addition of extra mechanics that aren't covered in the tutorial seem to be inconsistent and unintuitive compared to the basic game.

Still playing a lot of Automobilista 2, including exploring the multiplayer. Still probably the best racing game of its kind on the PC. Though it has enough minor flaws to stop just short of all-time greatness.

Cipher Zero is the puzzles from the Witness, but without the open world, but with a purely aesthetic audio-visual treatment. The puzzles themselves can be quite challenging but the difficulty ramps up so slowly they get frustrating. The theme of the game is to discover mechanics that are never explicitly taught. But so far every mechanic has been extremely obvious after one puzzle, but still goes through the motions of a 10-20 puzzle ramp up in difficulty. Potentially amazing, but eats a lot of time.

Occlude is another "work out the rules" as you go game. In this case it purports to be a series of custom solitaires that you have to infer the rules too. In actuality it's one (perfectly decent) solitaire variant with a handholding tutorial, and an associate ritual with magic coins that requires solving. Unfortunately all but the last are incredibly simple, and almost all reduce to some "Ignore everything else this is the card" clue. The lore is decent and it has a good spooky soundtrack that swells into a tense variant when the ritual is partially complete (By the games lore a partially complete ritual is worse than a failed one), that would be effective if it weren't guaranteed you know the rules by that point.

Australian point and click adventure game The Drifter is the most unapologetically Australian game I've played. It's a fantastic horror point-and-click adventure set in the fictional Australian city of "Mawson". The game starts with a homeless protagonist "Mick" returning to his homecity via a traincart, who gains the ability to warp back in time before he "dies". The story gets more fantastical from there.

The art, music, and general mood of The Drifter are all top-notch. But the real highlights are the writing and voice-acting of the story. Australian dialect, often regionally specific, is used without further explanation. While often blunt and darkly comic, serious topics are treated with the sensitivity they deserve. Some of the longer sequences of puzzles can drag out a bit, or be dependent upon picking up a moderately obscure item, and that game is a little to reliant on "Something happens after the third time you speak to this person in a row" scripting. But these rarely go beyond "standard point and click nonsense" levels of obscure.

Edit: I left out Kaizen: A Factory Story out. It's the game by Coincidence Studios, made up of a lot of ex-Zachtronics people. This one involves designing machinery for factory assembly lines in Japan. I enjoyed this game just as much as the best Zachtronics games for about the first 3/4 of the game. At which points the clumsy UI, and limited options made some of the harder puzzles a bit more of a chore than a challenge. Still a good game, but disappointed with it.

Tried Out, Revisited Briefly, or Viscerally Hated

PixelJunk™ Shooter Ultimate is an updated version of a game that blew me away with it's combination of twin stick shooting and physics simulation on the Playstation 3. In 2025 on the personal computer it is clumsy, weirdly punitive and unresponsive. I don't know if its just this version or if it was always like this. I genuinely regret replaying it

I briefly got started on the classic adventure game Sanitarium, which is very cheesy but fun. I stopped playing to check out some new games, and realised after the fact I should have just played more Sanitarium.

A few rounds of Straftat, the lightning fast FPS where battles end in seconds. It's still great, I wish there were more people around to play.

Logic Bombs is a weird puzzle game that combines nonograms (picross) and bomberman. The game spells out its rules in verbose and confusing written descriptions in tutorial levels. It's a potentially interesting system, but every design decision seems ill-advised and makes the game impossible to play or understand.

Bioysque is a weird abstract art pseudoRPG about a boy warrior fighting an evil AI mother or something. Incredibly cryptic and abstract. Was enjoying it until I got stuck in a loop eternally reloading 2 seconds before unavoidable death.

Compressure is Pipe Dream but about Steam. The UI doesn't make sense and the goals are completely unintuitive.

More like Shapez 2 long for a tutorial. Quit in anger when discovering that the cutting tools have fixed rotation based on cardinal direction to ensure that a puzzle about rotating items can't be solved by rotating an item.

White Knuckle is a first person climbing game where you can grip or manipulate things in each of your hands. It has a challenging but intuitive system with a lot of potential, and seemingly a heavy design hand that violently prevents you using it for things you shouldn't. In the real world if I jumped for a target and was 1 degree off I would narrowly miss and fall to my death, White Knuckle interprets this as the player consciously choosing to avoid success and will often just violently shove you backwards in a direction unrelated to input.

All Games Played


OpenTTD: GREAT


Automobilista 2: Good


RAMP 2025: GREAT (Notable)


Everdeep Aurora: GREAT (Notable)


Many Nights A Whisper: OK


Sultan's Game: Good


Paquerette Down the Bunburrows: Good


Cipher Zero: Good


Occlude: OK


The Drifter: GREAT (Notable)


PixelJunk™ Shooter Ultimate: OK


Sanitarium: GREAT


Straftat: GREAT


Logic Bombs: Disappointing


Bioysque: OK


Compressure: Disappointing


Shapez 2: Disappointing


White Knuckle: OK


Kaizen - A Factory Story: Good