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

Brainrack, Issue #352 (February 3, 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, 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!

January is over! 2026 got off to a great start, with a few great games already released: the logic pen&paper puzzle Alien Cartographer, the lateral thinking game full of secrets Social Catterpillar, the database thriller TR-49, and the challenging Sokoban Where's my egg?.

And February has something interesting planned for all puzzle subgenres. The games I’m most thrilled to see released this month are: the musical path programming Cadence, the surreal 3D test chambers ChromaGun 2, the nonogram roguelike CiniCross, the text-based computer hacking/database search Coldwake, the maze adventure HAMSTERMIND, the dreamlike point&click puzzle HER TREES : PUZZLE DREAM, the solitaire collection Lead To Gold, and the quantum sokoban Theta and Paralldox on Worldlines.

On Wednesday, come watch the Thinky Awards[thinkygames.com], celebrating the best thinky games of 2025. There’s a rumor that your favourite curator (right?) will be presenting one of the categories…

Starting on Thursday, there will be a small spotlight fest on typing games (just guessing the URL for now since the event isn't live yet). And at the end of the month, the first Steam Next Fest of the year will take place.

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:

• Festival Journey: Highland Dreams CE (hidden object)
  
• Secrets of Salem: The Phantom Cab CE (hidden object)

New Curatees with Mini-Reviews:

• Cubuleto (casual, isometric)
  
• Emerald Valley (point&click, detective)

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 there’s no need to create an account, just visit the site and log in through Steam. Good luck!

Both Christmas Hustle[www.steamgifts.com] and Miner Open Chests[www.steamgifts.com] are available only for our group members, courtesy of the developers.

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:

• HIT&BLOW (casual, indie)
  
• Maloomify the Ocean (casual, exploration)
  
• Mini Magic Match (match 3)
  
• Sandy (adventure, exploration)
  
• Slime Factory (casual)
  
• Elemental: Story Cards (card&board game)

New Demos:

The Demo of the Week is Box or Void.

• 😐 Ascension Act (multiagent movement, mystery): A strange game with several distinct facets. The core of the experience is solving simultaneous‑movement, multi‑agent puzzles: levels where you control several characters at once and must guide them to their own target. Instead of sharing a single space, they usually exist on separate layers. So you might be looking at 2, 3, 10, or even more levels all at the same time. While the first chapter plays as a manageable top‑down grid navigator, the second chapter adds gravity, turning it into a platformer where all characters jump simultaneously. Beyond that, there’s some light computer hacking, a rich story about an apocalyptic world, and psychological horror centered on torturing robots that may actually be trapped human minds. It’s an interesting game, but having to keep track of how each of the many characters jumps is ultimately too much for me.
  (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Box or Void (sokoban, pathfinding): A pathfinding game in which you can control both a white and a black avatar, each one being the background of the other. Move boxes of your color to set up paths for the other color, helping each other reach your goals. Another mechanic added in the third chapter is snake-like growing, eat apples to make yourself longer. This is a lot like the excellent Inner Tao, so it gets a highly recommended seal of approval from me.
  (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Chessfall (chess-like, roguelike): A chess puzzle in which you must defeat all the enemy pieces in each room, traverse the dungeon, and reach the treasure. There are various spells you can use, and you can change your piece type. As you progress through the dungeon, you’ll collect coins, find power-ups, and trade with the merchant. Even if you get one of your pieces captured or incapacitated, as long as you have more pieces available to transform into, you can keep fighting. It’s challenging when all you have is a pawn and a knight, but once I bought the rook, I felt almost invincible. Maybe the later chapters will ramp up the difficulty again. It’s a good game for anyone who wants a fun way to get more familiar with chess.
  (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Locktale (decryption): A decryption game in which each level continues a story that begins with “Once upon a time…”. Each level introduces a new type of cipher, starting with a simple number-to-letter mapping and progressing to pigpen, Caesar, skip, Atbash, and others. Every level includes helpful hints to put you on the right track. It’s a nice game if you enjoy cryptograms or want to learn more about ciphers.
  (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Nippets (hidden object): A hidden object game in which you’re not explicitly told what you’re looking for, and once you do find the target objects, you must also find the right place to return them to, like a ball that you must return to the kid who lost it, or a balloon to the crying kid left with a string in their hand. Nice, while I don’t normally like the rudimentary hidden objects plaguing Steam, I appreciate it when the game does something more, like this. (my playthrough)
  
• 🎉 Randel's Quest (wordle, roguelike): Battle Wordle: instead of just guessing words, at each guess, you must be careful what each color does. In a normal Wordle game, the goal is to get all greens, but here, before each guess, you get a random effect for every color, some useful, some harmful. Sometimes, even if you know the word, it makes more sense to intentionally flub if green harms you to death while gray heals you instead. Choose carefully which effects you get, visit the shop to upgrade, buy or sell effects, and make your way to the big boss. The end of the demo promises secrets and more customizations, so this looks like a great game if you like thinky roguelikes. (my playthrough)
  
• 😐 scale2fit (box puzzle): A box puzzle, place the given pieces to cover the entire grid, except that the pieces can be rescaled, made longer, taller, or both. That’s a nice idea! But the game could use a lot more polish; it looks very much like a DOS game from 1992. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Tile Trials (math, tiling, dominoes): A math-based puzzle in which you must place tiles in a grid to maximize your score. You can purchase and sell tiles, and the score you get depends on several factors: the numbers on the tile you placed, the color/effect of the ground you placed it on, the size of the regions you form… It’s a more thinky take on Dominoes, with more varied shapes. (my playthrough)
  
• 👍 Voraxis (roguelike, deckbuilder, pathfinding): A roguelike where the goal is to dig down through each level to the bottom—but only after collecting enough points. Each turn, you choose 3 of the 5 cards in your hand to play, each with different movement patterns. You have to balance descending before you run out of turns with collecting enough points, since failing at either results in a loss. After each level, you can buy new cards for your deck. It’s interesting; I liked it.
  (my playthrough)

https://steamhost.cn/app/3311670/Bento_Blocks/

You have to pack sushi into boxes. After a few introductory block-puzzle levels where you simply fit all the pieces into the box, the game’s real mechanic appears: you need to cut some pieces to make them fit. Each cut counts, and to earn a perfect score, you must solve the puzzle using only the allotted number of cuts. If you can’t find the optimal solution, that’s fine—you’ll just earn fewer stars. New mechanics are introduced in later chapters, keeping things fresh while still feeling approachable. It’s a good one; recommended.

https://steamhost.cn/app/3081690/Chromatic_Conundrum/

A 3D puzzle game where you use colored flashlights to trigger sensors that move platforms and open doors. You get RGB flashlights and their combinations, plus matching RGB sensors, so you have to shine the correct light on each sensor to progress. I enjoyed the demo and recommend it.

https://steamhost.cn/app/3622920/Green_Pond_Town/

A creepy point&click adventure/puzzle game from the makers of Isoland.

https://steamhost.cn/app/3931930/Moon_Garden_Optimizer/

A strategic farming puzzle game where you plant the right crops to build a stable, oxygen-producing forest. Each turn, plants both produce and consume resources. The most important resource is water, which is scarce and rarely generated in the garden, so the real goal is to finish the game before you run out. Energy allows you plant and uproot, but it doesn’t carry over between turns, so you use it or lose it. Plants also interact with each other: for example, ivy generates energy based on the number of surrounding trees, and palm trees create a lot of energy but destroy anything above them. The levels are tiny 5×5 grids, and sometimes it takes several turns to gather enough energy to plant anything, so the game is slow, deliberate, and puzzle-focused rather than a farming simulator. There are plenty of handcrafted challenge levels called “scenarios,” plus random games and daily challenges. It's recommended if you enjoy logic and strategy games.

https://steamhost.cn/app/3264490/Pastopia/

A 3D third-person platformer that blends many different ideas. You wield a magic staff that can shoot an assortment of spells. You’ll destroy and collect crystals, create objects of different shapes, and grab and move items to form new paths. The twist is that your spells are actually pieces of code you can modify and compile, and many interactive objects in the world are programmable as well. I only played the demo about a year ago and liked it, and the trailer suggests it has improved further since then. It’s recommended if you enjoy programming.

https://steamhost.cn/app/2233170/ReActivated/

Program a robot to move autonomously and reach the exit. And by ‘program,’ I mean simple logic: you just match conditions to actions — if there’s a gap, jump; if there’s an obstacle, turn around; if you see light, go to sleep. It’s just 2-4 conditions and an equal number of actions in every level, so it should be simple. And it’s not all automatic; you also have full control of a drone that can interact with the environment, pushing buttons at the right time, which actually makes the game interesting. Quite good, recommended.

https://steamhost.cn/app/4119120/Trypophobia/

Copy the target image, not as it appears now, but as it was before being transformed. Each level has three zones: the input, the transformation rules, and the target. You set up the input, then the transformations occur. The outcome must match the output. If, for example, the rules say that all reds turn blue, you must set all the input shapes that must be blue to red. The rules become increasingly complex, with multiple rules in each batch and several batches running in sequence. It’s a decent logic game, recommended if you don’t actually suffer from trypophobia (or if you want to get over it).

https://steamhost.cn/app/3623200/Upalu_Mundi/

Build train tracks to transport resources from one place to another. Few, but relevant, mechanics involving track splitting, track exclusivity, and station length. But the focus isn’t on solving puzzles, it’s on solving them optimally, with the perfect balance between cost and time. Your solutions are evaluated on a two‑dimensional performance grid, with an optimality graph showing the achievable completion time for every possible cost. You can try to solve it once, no matter the performance, or try to solve it once falling on any optimal performance point, or solve it at the extreme points of lowest cost and lowest time, or you can try to hit all of the optimal points, solving the same level for every possible cost. This game is ideal for those who always try to get the best scores in Zach-like games. Very highly recommended.

https://steamhost.cn/app/3517300/The_Way_of_Knight/

Guide chess pieces across boards to reach the goal tiles. Capture other pieces, avoid capture, trigger trapdoors, and try to do it in the optimal number of moves. You start with a single knight piece, but you will be joined by other pieces in later chapters, giving you control of combinations of two knights and a king. There’s also a story with several levels, including cutscenes detailing what’s going on in the kingdom. Good puzzles, good QoL, recommended.

https://steamhost.cn/app/4218030/wheres_my_egg/

A brilliant Sokoban game where the goal is always to reach the egg. Doors block your path, so you’ll need to point lasers at targets or push boxes onto buttons to open them. While the first half impressed me with its clever puzzles, the second half convinced me this is truly outstanding, introducing even more surprising and interesting mechanics from just a few simple elements. It’s definitely one of the best puzzle games of the year—highly recommended.

And the Rest:

• Build From Scratches (cozy): Drag and drop assembly, combine parts to build all kinds of toys and electronics. Short and easy.
  
• Chesscape Room (chess-like): Chess, but the goal is to get the king to the exit.
  
• Duality Paradox (sokoban): A sokoban in which you switch between white and black (foreground and background), pushing boxes on their targets. It’s a clever idea, but the game is very bare-bones: it has five tutorials and only three proper levels, an unpolished minimalist UI, and worse, it has a move counter to stress you into finding a good solution.
  
• Earth Must Die (point&click, adventure, funny, mature audiences): A classic point&click adventure in which a nepo-baby alien seeks revenge on Earth after he accidentally surrendered his inherited kingdom.
  
• Flipside (puzzle platformer): A puzzle platformer in which you can also turn the level left or right. It’s both a thinky and a precision platformer, especially in the later levels when you get periodic projectiles flying towards you or tight spots you must land on. Each level actually consists of about four sub-levels, each focused on a single mechanic—for example, a simple world-rotation stage, deadly saws, cannons, or one-way walls… It’s good, each level is quite small, so even if it requires some precision, failing means replaying just a few seconds.
  
• HackHub - Ultimate Hacker Simulator (hacking simulator)
  
• Neon Mind (simultaneous multiagent pathfinding): Guide multiple avatars through a grid full of special tiles, with simple graphics and challenging levels.
  
• NET.CRAWL (strategy, roguelike, early access): A deck-building puzzle roguelike played on a hexagonal grid. Use cards to place items in the grid, activate them when you walk on them, collect points, and avoid damage, then attack the boss. Colorful but complex, challenging but quick.
  
• OxU 2 (pipe puzzle): From a developer who puts out lots of puzzle game clones with little level design. This is a 3D minimalist pipe puzzle. Rotate and move tiles with lines on them to form uninterrupted lines connecting all the endpoints. With more mechanics like portals, pushers, lasers, and 3D cubes. Mostly easy and relaxing.
  
• Pack my LunchBox (casual, food, cozy): Each day, you get a textual description of the lunch to pack, and you have to pick four items that match the requirements. Sometimes it’s an easy pick, like “I want a fruity drink”, sometimes it’s a bit more detailed, like “I want a dessert that’s not too heavy and tastes like chocolate.” So, what does “heavy” mean, and does that require full chocolate, or does the chocolate drizzle on top of a croissant count? Luckily, there is no penalty for getting it wrong; you can keep on trying until you get it right. It’s a cozy game, but it does require a good command of the English language and some food knowledge.
  
• Spring Tales (point&click, cozy, adventure): Super easy, relaxing point&click game about doing various activities: pour coffee, scrub dishes, sort objects, bake desserts. The graphics and activities are simple, with very light puzzle activities.

Highlighting a short and free puzzle game every week!

A food game in which you have to guess recipes. Each day, you get a list of ingredients and a little template like “saute 5 ingredients, mix 3 dry ingredients, combine”, and figure out which ingredients go together. There may be a hidden easter egg as well, two ingredients that are not part of the recipe but which would otherwise make something meaningful. Once you finish the level, you’ll get a real recipe you can try to cook yourself. It’s a very yummy game! Works in a browser, even on a phone.

Highlighting another free puzzle game every week!

Not quite a full game, but a nice demo for an upcoming game. Mow the grass perfectly, but be careful not to over-mow it. And can you figure out what makes the flowers happy? 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.