Whether you like to visit space, indulge in an RPGs or a grand adventure, get spooked by horror or get uber techy with hacking, the chances are that there's also a puzzle game for you - hence our list of the best puzzle games on PC. The queen genre straddles many others, so our list of the 25 best puzzle games has all that we just mentioned and more. Take a look to find a new favourite puzzle game today.
]]>The minds behind Opus Magnum and Infinifactory are dropping another clever game for ya. Möbius Front '83 is a new strategy game by Zachtronics set in a past where the United States is being invaded by its dark realm self. Möbius Front '83 will launch its turn-based tactical battles in November.
]]>Opus Magnum is the most tactile game I've ever played. Playing it makes me remember last Christmas, when I was given one of those wooden assembly kits where you have to snap together the various wood pieces like a jigsaw to create a three-dimensional sculpture. In my case, it was a little steampunk clock, all interconnected gears and ornate swirls. Turning a gear at the bottom would turn other gears, and the minute and hour hands on the clock face would turn in tandem with the gears.
It was very fulfilling to piece together something so beautiful and functional. But what I remember most about it wasn't the end result. It was the feeling of those wooden pieces snapping perfectly together. Like most people, I'm drawn to tactile things, and the right combination of texture, sound, and resistance can invoke a surprising emotional reaction in me.
]]>If you plumb the depths of human ingenuity you will resurface with a wet box of penicillin and 100 million bits of different-coloured plastic. We people are very good at making useful things, and then killing ourselves with them. But videogames, my friends. Videogames hold the solution to our self-destructive ways. That tech utopia your pal Start-up Stan is always talking about is in reach, we just need to find a way to make these 12 practical devices from videogames appear in real life.
]]>It is so likeZach to release a Zachlike (just a Zach to his friends) about creating drugs in a small Romanian apartment. Molek-Syntez is now squatting on early access, trying to hook you in with the good stuff as you program your molecular synthesiser. Your goal is to turn chemicals into medicines and other substances with "various pharmacological effects".
]]>We’re living in a Zachlike world. It's a world where games can be about the internal rhythm of things, and where you can create works of art from rulesets. It’s why Zachtronic's game Opus Magnum let people share gifs of what they’ve made, explained here by game developer and ex-desk sharer of mine, Tom Francis. And yet this post isn’t about a Zach Barth game. This is about Neon Noodles, a game about optimising the work of robot chefs as they prepare meals. It's the perfect format because food is both a science and art. The open beta is free on Steam right now.
]]>Cor, kids have it easy nowadays. Sure, they're inheriting a polluted hellhole teetering on the brink of ecological and economic ruin, but look at all the neat games they get to grow up with. Thanks to Zachtronics announcing they're giving away (nearly) all their games to schools, some of them even get to muck about with fabulously inventive puzzle boxes during their pretend workday. Imagine that! Privileged tykes.
]]>Zach-like, the book about Zachlikes by Zach Barth, creator of the genre, is now free albeit notably less papery now. Zachtronics's previously Kickstarter-exclusive book was a collection of design documents from the creator of Spacechem, Opus Magnum, Infinifactory and many more, showing just how he engineers his puzzles. Now anyone can read a digital version for free, and it comes bundled with a pile of his early browser games, unreleased prototypes, and even a card game if you've got printer ink to burn. Grab it free on Steam. I feel smarter just having it on my PC.
]]>Continuing to copy the tastes of RPS, the Independent Games Festival Awards last night awarded Return Of The Obra Dinn the Seumas McNally Grand Prize during the Game Developers Conference, with a cheeky Excellent In Narrative award on the side too. We declared it our favourite game of 2018 so, y'know, good on ya Ian GF. Correct decision. The other prizes were won by Mirror Drop, Paratopic, Opus Magnum, Black Room, and After Hours, and ooh there's two I don't recognise and will have to check out.
]]>I reckon most of the RPS Treehouse gang love us some Zachlikes, since well before Alice Prime coined the term in 2016 in reference to Shenzhen I/O. Puzzlemeister Zach Barth likes the term too, as he's borrowed it for the title of his book. Currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter (500% funded in one day), Zach-Like shows the workings and the processes behind his practical puzzlers. There's design docs for his major games, sketches and documents for some that never got made and some early design exercises. There's even some pen-and-paper brainteasers in there, because we're gluttons for punishment.
]]>The finalists for the 2019 Independent Games Festival award ceremony on March 20th have been announced, and they remind me just how joyful a challenge it is to keep up with indie development. Every category is packed with exciting, creative endeavours both complete or still in development - a reminder that 2018 was a great year for games, and 2019 stands to be even better. Now I've just got to keep track of all of them.
Among the headliners for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize are RPS favourites like low-fi groundhog day adventure Minit, the excellent maritime mystery Return Of The Obra Dinn (which Andreas Inderwildi picked apart earlier today) and the bizarre Hypnospace Outlaw, a deep dive into a fictional 90s internet dream-world. Also in the running is virtual voyeur sim Do Not Feed The Monkeys, and the upcoming physics-driven platform roguelike Noita. Every category is full of exciting games, though - check out the full list on the IGF page here, or below.
]]>It’s pretty obvious that the excellent Exapunks is a game about hacking. Specifically, it’s a game about programming viruses and sending them into networked systems to monkey around with data, set in a great alternative 90s Wired cyberworld of PC cases flashed with black and red decals and zines set in Apple Garamond.
For its makers, though, Exapunks is a game about limitations. Its format is the result of hard decisions about how much space you get to write your code in, how much freedom you get to solve its puzzles, and how it’s presented on your screen. And even now, creative director Zach Barth isn’t totally sure he and his team got it right.
]]>What Works And Why is a new monthly column where Gunpoint and Heat Signature designer Tom Francis digs into the design of a game and analyses what makes it good.
Opus Magnum is a puzzle game about designing machines that arrange and combine shiny little atoms to turn lead to gold, and other fanciful alchemy. It's by Zachtronics, whose games follow such a recognised pattern that they've become a genre: the Zachlike. SpaceChem, Infinifactory, Shenzhen IO, and now Opus Magnum all involve designing an automated system to process some given input, and produce some desired output. But it's a particular quirk of this format I want to dive into, and it's one Opus Magnum does especially well: optimisation.
]]>The DRM-free digital game store GOG have reversed a baffling curation decision and started selling Opus Magnum, the wonderful machine-building puzzler from the studio behind Spacechem and Shenzhen I/O. GOG had initially declined to stock the game and gave developers Zachtronics a mysterious explanation that it "did not pass our internal curation system". Given that Opus Magnum is one of the best PC games of 2017 and that GOG already stocked several similar Zachtronics games, y'know, it was weird. With digital stores drawing different lines in the virtuasand over which games they will and won't stock, this stuck out as an unexpected casualty of curation.
]]>The calendar's doors have been opened and the games inside have been eaten. But fear not, latecomer - we've reconstructed the list in this single post for easy re-consumption. Click on to discover the best games of 2017.
]]>The age of machines has begun. I'm not talking about world conquering, human enslaving robots from the Matrix or what have you, nor the warped logic of paperclip-producing AIs. I'm talking about clunky factory lines producing wizard-viagra ('stamina' potions), and cobbled together contraptions that eventually churn out stain-removers. Now that I think about it, those were two unfortunate examples to use next to each other.
What I'm trying to say is that ace puzzler Opus Magnum left early access on Thursday, so you've got no excuse not to jump in and start building machines of your own.
]]>The alchemical puzzler Opus Magnum has a few of us at House RPS scratching our heads and shouting "a-ha!" before giddily sharing our twisted contraptions in GIF form. It's real good, friends. The studio behind it, Zachtronics, is headed by Zach Barth. I spoke to him about the game's machines, his short stint at Valve, and the reasons he sold his own company.
]]>Cowardice is a virtue. So says the team on this week's RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. That's because our theme is "running away" - games that encourage you to flee from danger, or that give you a choice between fight and flight. Adam will run from the soldiers of Arma or the post-apocalyptic antagonists of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Brendan will scarper from poor odds in For Honor or Overwatch, while Alice only pretends to run away in Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, tricking her foes into giving chase before ambushing them like some kind of velociraptor.
]]>We've already seen some amazing contraptions come out of Opus Magnum - someone's even made a computer - but the Opus-est of Magnums might be yet to come. Zachtronics have stuck an additional chapter on to the end of the alchemy-based puzzler's campaign, and it looks hard as hell.
]]>By the laws of the game-o-sphere, a computer made from the marbles and metal of alchemy-based puzzler Opus Magnum almost seems like an inevitability. Alchemy and code fan Peer Backhaus has built a - ahem - "Brainfuck interpreter", which is a real computing term and not something I expected to see in my emails when I came into work this morning.
]]>Opus Magnum is Zachtronics’ best game and you’ll have to extricate me from an impossible web of metal talons if you want to argue otherwise. It's both understandable and open-ended. I spent almost ten hours on a single puzzle last week, not because I couldn’t decipher a solution but because I wanted a better solution. In the end, the stain remover I invented was a terrible, hacky mess. But I was proud of it. Like all of nature’s most wondrous creations, it had 17 arms.
]]>The fever of alchemical engineering has descended on the RPS team like a dank fog. Opus Magnum is the new Zachtronics puzzler that asks you to make some hair gel out of salt and a hangover cure out of marbles. It's really good. We’ve already shown you some mechanical marvels and talked about it on the podcast but since the game includes a “record GIF” button, we wanted to show off three of our own proudest creations. Come see the clockwork beauty of our well-oiled machines.
]]>Alice is on holiday and she's taken all the games with her. Luckily some developers released new games after she'd left, so the rest of us still have something to play. Our choices are below, but we want to know from you: what are you playing in this weekend of plenty?
]]>It's a simple theme this week with the Electronic Wireless Show. We're talking about guilty pleasures - the games that make us feel a wee bit embarrassed but not so much that we won't squirrel away at them while grinning like idiots. Alec feels a bit sheepish bringing his toy steering wheel to work when planning to play American Truck Simulator. Meanwhile, Matt remembers how he enjoyed the passage of time while picking flax in a Runescape field, and Brendan attempts to explain the relaxing sea-based boredom of Sailaway.
We've also been tinkering with alchemical puzzler Opus Magnum from Zachtronics, fiddling with small machines to produce precious metals, hangover cures and the kinds of "stamina potions" you might find spamming up your junk folder. Come listen, guilt-free.
]]>I am raising my head from the alchemy desk to tell you: Opus Magnum is out now and it is good. It's the new puzzle game from Zachtronics which crept up on us this week. This studio’s puzzlers have a definite flavour to them. They’re about fiddling with machines, hacking together a solution out of strange gadgets and mental duct tape before revealing a loudly-ticking device and feeling impossibly proud of yourself. This is no different, except that your end results are flipping gorgeous.
]]>Is there any joy like the humble Zachlike? Don’t answer that. Zach Barth, creator of head-scratchers like Spacechem and SHENZHEN I/O, continues his slow march towards filling the planet earth with intricately complex puzzle games. His development studio has just announced Opus Magnum [official site] a game of dark machinery and darker alchemy in which you must use a “transmutation engine” to create “vital remedies, precious gemstones, deadly weapons, and more”. You will be pleased to learn that it too has a built-in solitaire game.
]]>
.png?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp "שחרורו של Assassin's Creed Shadows נדחה למרץ כאשר מועצת המנהלים של Ubisoft שוקל מכירת חברה")