Puzzle Games

Nine-hundred and ninety-nine feet below the surface of Donut County, there is a group of people gathered around a camp fire. Everyone there knows exactly how they each came to be in this strange new place, but none of them can agree on the reason. Could it be snakes? Perhaps it was the devious raccoons? All anyone can say for certain is Mira, the owner of the local donut shop, seems to be at the center of it all. We know better though. We know "a hole" lot better.

It's refreshing to make it to the smaller booths and see what developers outside of the US think of PAX East, and how their backgrounds affect the ways they approach game design.

If you stumbled upon My Memory of Us at IMGN.PRO’s booth on the PAX East show floor, you’d think it was rather innocuous. Look a little deeper, however, and you’ll see the real story of children coping with a historical horror with only friendship and their imaginations to guide the way.

We visited the Kalahari Resort in the Pocono Mountains to check out Zero Latency's Arena VR, a new attraction that lets you experience room-scale virtual reality with a group of friends.

Rhombus of Ruin is short, but it does well as a VR game, a reminder of the colorful quirk many of us like about the Psychonauts world and a teaser of what’s coming next.

The PAX Rising (up-and-coming indie games) and PAX Australia (indie games from down under) booths were conveniently situated right next to each other, so every time I passed through, I was able to get some hands-on time with more weird, colorful, strange games. Here are a few of my favorites.

On paper, Gorogoa is a pretty basic puzzle game. In execution, it’s something else entirely.

We met with tinyBuild at PAX South to learn more and experience the fast-paced action of the upcoming Mr. Shifty from Team Shifty and we came away with an adrenaline rush like few others on the floor.

Death Squared is deceptively simple with an astronomically high ceiling for complexity and difficulty.

We went hands-on with What Remains of Edith Finch at PAX South, and what we saw was a great narrative with a variety of gameplay elements to make it both intriguing and engaging.