August Was a Great Month for Puzzles

I can't stop thinking about two puzzle games that came out last month. They're both the kind of game that makes me jealous for not having designed it myself, then jealous again for knowing that even with the idea in my hands I couldn't execute it as well. Those two games are Strange Jigsaws and Öoo.

Strange Jigsaws is a meta-puzzle exploration built on the humble jigsaw puzzle. If you're not into jigsaws (I don't blame you, they're not particularly puzzling) don't be dissuaded. The puzzles in Strange Jigsaws encompass a wide variety of different logic and themed puzzles, jigsaws only in the narrowest sense.

Thanks to those jigsaws, the game is incredibly tactile. FLEB clearly knows what he's doing when he designs puzzles that emphasize juicy interactions. Moving, rotating, and slotting puzzle pieces is dopamine delivered straight to the brain.

The real triumph of Strange Jigsaws is the breadth of ideas and overall quality of their execution. There are a ton of different puzzle ideas in the game, almost none of which are a plain ol' jigsaw. Each puzzle is a fresh challenge with a consistent difficulty, a bit on the easy side but only so much as to avoid any sense of frustration.

I played through Strange Jigsaws in three, one-hour sessions. It's a game that's very amenable to short sessions since each puzzle is neatly self-contained.

Öoo is likewise a short game. I finished in just under two hours, but that two hours was a single, non-stop playthrough. Öoo is not an easy game to put down.

Design-wise, Öoo is kind of the antithesis of Strange Jigsaws. Where Strange Jigsaws delights by introducing new mechanics with every puzzle, Öoo is a study into the possibility space of a single idea. That single idea grows deeper as the player accumulates the knowledge of how to apply it to the surrounding world.

That means mechanics in Öoo aren't so much introduced as revealed. Every puzzle advances the player's intuition of the mechanical language underlying Öoo, unveiling how that language interacts with the surrounding world and how the player can use that language to solve puzzles. The player character doesn't gain new abilities. Instead, the player learns the world and the world reveals itself as one great puzzle.

It's hard to overstate how much design excellence Öoo squeezes out of its mechanics. Several times a solution left me blurting out in laughter, amazed by how Öoo bent the rules of the world and re-contextualized my expectations. It's a uniquely joyful experience.

It's hard to believe that two of the best puzzle games that I've played in the last two years came out in the same month. Do yourself a favor and check them out.