Tametsi is one of the best logic puzzle games you can buy on PC. It’s up there with Hexcells in my mind, albeit without the latter’s exquisite presentation. Its increasing complexity and perfect difficulty curve makes it one of the most compelling puzzles I’ve had the pleasure to play.

This is such a visually interesting game, using so many different and captivating methods to tell its stories. It’s very sad, and that’s absolutely OK. It offers truth, catharsis, or best of all, gratitude for what you still have. I think this is really splendid.

This is a treat. It’s about a quarter of the length of the games it emulates, but at a squillionth of the price. The animation and pixel art is a nostalgic delight, cutting no corners at all, and the writing is brisk, fun, and always cheerful. That this withstands the comparisons it invites is no small feat, and I dearly hope there’s more to come.

So what price beauty? Patience. And how much you have with the game will determine your enjoyment. For me, an hour or so after finishing it, I’m already finding the memory of the irritations melting away, and the lovely art and story taking over. But the exasperation happened, and it’s my job to say so.

I’ve had such a good time! I haven’t giggled like that in a long while. I’m not proud of it, except that I am, but I snickered and smirked and properly laughed my way through building the silliest pots the ever-expanding collection of tools allowed me to. And then felt enormous pride as my pottery drew in the crowds to my exhibitions in their hundreds, raking in cash, with people writing me letters begging to buy my work. My Work. Capital W. [Early Access Score = 78]

Hexologic is an excellently presented puzzle game, offering some lighter fair than your Hexcells-like challenges, and it’s incredibly cheap.

It’s exhausting. That it’s a story means you’ll want to read to the end, but doing so requires a really concerted effort. Which is, obviously, the point. It’s an extremely effective window into the routine life of those with dyslexia, and has very quickly revealed to me how much I don’t take that seriously enough. The idea that the whole world would be encoded behind these shifting, frustrating, bemusing glyphs is utterly overwhelming, a realisation that’s a complete “well duh” for millions of people.

Tangle Tower is, without a doubt, one of my favourite games of 2019. It’s a joy, some of the finest writing I can remember, accompanied by fantastic performances, excellent puzzles, and a murder mystery that twists and turns throughout its lengthy run. This is completely magnificent.

The White Door is their most successful entry yet, a brilliantly imaginative, unsettling puzzle adventure that increasingly weaves its way into the ongoing Rusty Lake mythos, while operating independently of everything that’s come before.

Yes! This! I love it so much! It’s fun, cute, fast, with utterly perfect controls. And hang on both grapples at the same time and you can kwaping yourself upward as if on bungee cords! I can think of no higher recommendation.

What’s so special here is there’s no deep dark secret. There’s no awful reveal. This is a positive game! It’s about nice people having a good time! Goodness me, it’s extraordinary that this is such a rare thing as to feel notable, but yes! It’s not dishonestly upbeat, but it offers a reflection of a really normal part of life that most media so peculiarly ignores: when things go well. Lovely moments sometimes get to gently peter out, rather than end in Sudden Calamity.

It looks lovely, it stays out of your way as you’re playing, but sensibly highlights rows and columns as you hover over them, and thank goodness there’s an option to switch off the inflatables-in-the-gutters cheating that highlights clues that can currently be addressed. So, independently of anything else, it’s a top quality delivery of a puzzle type that seems to elude so many.

So, yes, it makes absolutely no sense. And yet within its own doolally world, it makes all the sense. It’s a lovely, daft, interesting, deep and complex game, with no combat, no death, just choices and consequences. Ethical dilemmas and questions of morality. And, perhaps most importantly, a head-banging puffer fish and a breakdancing crab.

That aside, this is a very decent first-person puzzle game, albeit heavily weighed down by its derivative nature, that constant sense that you’re playing ideas from other games pasted together. However, when there doesn’t appear to be another Portal or Talos Principle coming along any time soon, this is a great scratch for anyone with that itch.

Where you might be used to Breakout clones offering bonus drops, and that dilemma of trying to catch it before zooming across the screen to get the ball before it drops, here with so much more going on that becomes a much more interesting proposition. You might be in hand-to-hand fisticuffs with an eyeball, trying to blat it before it explodes fireballs in all directions, while seeing a fall of coins to your right, and an iron ball power-up falling to the left, all while trying to judge in which direction the ball’s going to eventually come down.

All of this is presented in a really beautiful way, the levels bursts of colour, changing depending upon your actions, and soundtracked not by a score, but rather the music of your movements. Transferring to the other side of a block, picking up a shape, going past certain places, rotating, sliding, all come with musical plinks and plonks, and your actions build the soundtrack to your play. It’s something Matthew Brown nodded toward in the Hexcells games, and here Nicolás Recabarren and Tomás Batista take it a stage further.

It all just comes together so nicely, the lovely cartoon design looking splendid, somehow managing to operate hundreds of enemies on screen at once without any issues, and offering a really good level of challenge without ever putting me off having another try. This is a properly fun time.

While meddling with the linearity of reality is hardly new for first person games, what I love about how Paradox Vector delivers its impossible corridors is the speed. Normally when exploring corners to find real life is looping impossibly, that you’ve taken five right-angled right turnss and appeared somewhere else, it’s done with a pace that ensures you take it all in. Here you’re zipping about almost (but not quite) as fast an old-school FPS, and realising your shredding of the Euclid’s surviving texts as you zip on by.

I enjoy playing it though! I’m not wholly convinced I’d be as enjoying it had I spent £15 to do so. Although I’m pretty convinced that aficionados would understand the pricing a lot more. I mean, it’s certainly of note that my highest score is around 18 million, while there are scores on the leaderboards over 2 billion. That is clearly indicative of a lot more game than I’ve been able to touch.

As the complexity increases, the time you’ll spend with puzzles grows, as you start out on multi-part endeavours within one screen, trying to wire up circuits to open barriers to be able to restart the puzzle over with more freedom to rearrange the pieces, in order to wire up circuits to open bar… You get the idea. And yet it never feels obtuse, nor perhaps most importantly, smug. Instead there’s a cheery demeanour throughout, even when the puzzling has teeth.