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

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, posted on Mondays (evening US time, night EU time, Tuesday morning AUS time).

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!

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.

• Campgrounds Adventures: The Big Oopsie (time management)
  
• Candle Prick (sokoban)
  
• LUMINES REMASTERED (arcade, rhythm)
  
• Millie and Molly (platformer)
  
• Nightshade Mysteries: Eternal Moon (adventure)
  
• Nurikabe World (logic)

• Pod Jam (strategy)
  
• A Slug's Dream (sokoban)

The giveaways are on SteamGifts, but no need to create an account, just visit the site and log in through Steam. Good luck!

Got 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.

• Elemental Surge (platformer)
  
• Skystead Christmas (hidden object)
  
• Vysions (adventure)

• Probability Race (logic)

• birdworld (RPG): Bizarre retro RPG, play as a bird exploring a strange monochromatic underworld, with occasional puzzles to solve and enemies to fight. Not enough puzzles, too much walking and fighting (and inspecting all the crates and trash cans for the rare chance there’s stuff in them). Decent as a retro RPG with a unique theme, but not as a puzzle game.
  
• Dragon Heartburn (geometry, anti-shooter): You’re a dragon with terrible heartburn, so you’re constantly spewing fire out of your mouth. But you’re a civilized dragon working in an office, so you don’t want to burn to a crisp all your coworkers. You must guide the dragon and its infinite breath carefully through office environments, avoiding getting any coworker directly in front of you. Funny concept, decent early demo quality implementation, a bit buggy and hard to control on the Steam Deck. Reminded me of the good and free The WereCleaner.
  
• Flicker (pathfinding): Very nice game about finding the right path to light up all the candles in a grid. You’re a sentient flame among unlit candles. You can move between adjacent candles, but you only have a limited amount of “energy” before you can no longer move, so you must find a smart path. Moving to an unlit candle takes two points of energy, while moving to an already lit candle takes only one. You also get additional mechanics, candles that replenish your energy, that increase (or decrease) your total energy, matches that burn out in 3 turns, and a few others, so the levels can be quite challenging. Very good puzzle, and a beautiful implementation.
  
• Forklift Certified (driving, exploration): Drive a forklift, pick up and drop off items, various game types. Maybe I’m just terrible at driving, but this really didn’t appeal to me.
  
• Ginger (language, deduction): This is one of the most unique games I’ve tried. What you get is a dictionary of a made up language. What you can do is try to speak its words, and try to translate it. You control a mouth, the position of the tongue and the shape of the lips, and make sounds. Combine these sounds to say the words in the dictionary. As you say more words, something shows up on the screen. I’d like an in-game notepad to jot down observations and possible translations.
  
• Just a Little Purr suit (pathfinder): Golf Peaks but with a different theme, instead of moving a ball towards a hole you move a cat towards a bird. Easy levels in the demo showcasing a few mechanics, but the game is still very basic, with no settings, no progress saving, awkward controls. Something to keep an eye on.
  
• Lab Cats (co-op platformer): Guide two cats through puzzling platforms trying to escape a deadly lab. Unless you can play really well with two hands, this requires two players, since there are many parts that require careful coordination between the two cats. Nice game, too bad (for me) it’s co-op only.
  
• Locator (deduction): Your goal is to place photographs on the right spot on a map, combining what you see in the photo, on the map, and in a textual description from a journal. A unique deduction game worthy of a try.
  
• Place Icebergs Apart (block puzzle): A unique take on the Block Puzzle concept, instead of closely fitting blocks in a grid, you must fit them so that they don’t touch each other. 10 simple levels in the demo, simple but cozy implementation, looks like a nice relaxing puzzler.
  
• Sudoku Acres (sudoku, cozy building): Play sudoku to earn coins and build a cozy farm. This mixes two very distinct genres, logic and cozy decorations, which I don’t think will please the fans of either of those two. The Sudoku implementation is very basic, with almost none of the helpful features one would expect. Also, it plays at a fixed, very small resolution, so the “numbers” in the grid are actually a few pixels trying to resemble a vegetable, and too many times I made mistakes because I confused the orange carrots and the orange pumpkins, or I didn’t see that there was already a tiny turnip in this area.

• Asterism (adventure)
  
• The Escape Room Chronicles ep1:The Mysterious KumaDonald's (escape room)
  
• Hanzi Match (match3 + mahjong)
  
• My Hidden Dreams (perspective manipulation, jigsaw, mystery, adventure)
  
• Super Puzzled Cat (platformer)
  
• Wormventures - Barrier 51 (adventure, exploration)

Highlighting a short and free puzzle game every week!

Highlighting another free puzzle game every week!

Puzzler screenshots are mostly for providing hints or solutions, but they can still be beautiful, funny, or some other adjectives, so post yours in the Screenshots thread on the forum, include a caption if you want, and we might put it in one of the next issues. No spoilers, please!

• This month's Humble Choice subscription has Boxes: Lost Fragments.
  
• The Programming Games Bundle[www.humblebundle.com] has a bunch of excellent programming games.

You can always check our curator for curated titles on sale. Specials on the front page is incomplete, click the Discounts tab for more.

Not to be confused with our Deal of the Week, which is just an especially good deal from the weeklies. Every week we'll pick a puzzler we really like and try to push it down everyone's throats. But with love because it's so good. Or highlight a lesser-known title that's unlikely to get curated. Comment below if you'd like to write about an undeservedly forgotten game for next time!

Show the world how good (or bad) you are at puzzle games by submitting your Workshop levels, guides, walkthroughs, mods, artwork inspired by a puzzler, or whatever, even if it's not a game curated by us, in this forum thread or below in the comments, to be featured here next time.

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.