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

Brainrack, Issue #359 (Week of March 16, 2026)

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.

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, join the No Clue Discord server[discord.gg], 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!

Catching up on the newsletter, now just two weeks behind.

A lot of great releases in this newsletter, with the gigantic logic game The Artisan of Glimmith, which has been eating up most of my playtime, the surprise release of a new Ponzu Cafe game, LEMMICK WORLD, the two great detective games The Ratline and Murder at the Birch Tree Theater, the cute looking, but very challenging Poke ALL Toads, the scary boulder dashing The Portsmoor Abysm, and others, all vying for attention. The good news? They’re all worth it. The bad news? They’re ALL worth it! So many good games, so little time… Well, read on for more detailed descriptions, I hope you’ll find something you like. And there are even more great games that will be listed in the next Brainrack.

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.

New Curatees with Full Reviews:

• AntVentor (adventure)

New Curatees with Mini-Reviews:

• ℹ️ A Ridiculous Waste of Time (casual, arcade)
  
• Outpacked (logic, management)

Please let us know in the Curator Info thread if you'd like to write mini-reviews (max. 200 characters, positive or negative) for puzzlers that aren't curated by us yet. Examples and inspiration can be found on the Group Member Recommendations list.


https://store.steampowered.com/app/4160210/The_Artisan_of_Glimmith/

There’s a huge open world full of “altars”, and clicking on one opens a simple logic grid to solve. Each grid asks you to divide it into regions, either by shading them in or by outlining their borders, whichever approach you prefer. Every area in the world introduces its own set of rules: a region might need to match one of the allowed shapes, include one of each symbol, contain an exact number of tiles, use a unique configuration, or follow any number of other conditions and combinations of conditions. I had a great time working through the more than 1000 puzzles. Each one seems unique, and some even had an excellent trick to them, requiring a clever observation about some constraints imposed on the solution, or a hidden starting point. Each area requires only a few puzzles to be solved before the next area is unlocked, so you don’t have to stay stuck on the harder puzzles before exploring the rest of the game. There’s also a fun secondary layer: discovering the hidden puzzles tucked throughout. Since the camera cannot be rotated, you must find the right perspective that allows you to spot the altar under the bridge, behind a wall, or hidden by a tree’s canopy. If that’s not something you enjoy, after reaching the end, you unlock the ability to highlight these hard-to-find puzzles. It is a lovely logic game, highly recommended!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4169920/CYPHER_DUNGEON/

Explore a dungeon full of numbers, deadly enemies, and secrets. The goal of the game is to figure out/guess codes. There are 3 types of codes, in order of importance: A, B, and C. The 13 A codes unlock upgrades and require unique insights into the meaning of the dungeon. The B codes are more of the same, applying the patterns of the A codes in more places. The C codes seem to be mostly about general knowledge and meta-details about the game. I enjoyed the first half of the game, figuring out enough A codes to unlock all the powers and explore the entire dungeon, but the second half of the cyphers feels like too much searching in the dark, trying various numbers until I hit something meaningful, and I’m running out of ideas. Still, if you like spotting patterns, give this one a try.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4421450/LEMMICK_WORLD/

When I first saw this game, I was about to dismiss it as an easy maze pretending to be a puzzle game. But I decided to give it a try. Yes, it starts really trivially; the first chapter flew by in a couple of minutes. But the more I played, the more I realized something… Could it be...? It's very familiar, I recognized the pacing of the chapters, the quirky mechanics, the graphics, the settings… And yes, it's a new game from Ponzu Cafe! The past two games are some of my all time favorites, and this one lives up to — and even surpasses — the standard! Ponzu games really cover the 0-10+ range of difficulties well. The last chapter is getting me totally stumped! So, Lemmick World is a maximalist puzzle game in 2.5D, in which you have to reach the flower seedling in each level. 2.5D means that while the levels are a 2D grid, there are two floors, with bridges you can go over and under, stairs and slides, and blocks you can climb on. Maximalist, because there are a lot of mechanics, like cubes you can push, a mattress you can pull that lets you climb on top of cubes, fans that blow hard enough that you can’t move into the wind, fires, buckets you can fill with water to extinguish the fires or turn slippery sand into hard soil, keys that unlock doors, rafts, hamster wheels, movable platforms, and many others. And while my main complaint in past Ponzu games was the lack of QoL, this one made a lot of progress; there’s little to complain about. Oh, and the lemmick is really cute, scratching and sleeping when it doesn’t move. Highly recommended!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4018950/Lost_Wiki_Kozlovka/

Explore a Wikipedia-like web of documents, following links to discover new pages. Read all the pages to figure out what happened, and then fill in the blanks of a statement to progress. It’s a mystery: you have to figure out what happened to a city in a fictional Soviet country, though many of the place names are real. It’s a good and innovative concept, though perhaps a bit too short.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2864590/Murder_at_the_Birch_Tree_Theater/

A fill-in-the-blanks detective game, investigate the crime scenes that seem to plague a theatre company. Year after year, there’s a new tragedy that you must unravel. Inspect people and items, collect words, put all the clues together, then fill in the blanks to identify the people and describe the events. It’s a good Golden Idol-like, but focused more on words than on visual details.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4466900/Overwords_Infinity/

A (free) sequel to Overwords, a minimalist game about cramming words into a grid. I liked the original, and since it was a bit short, this sequel adds endless modes.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3993210/Pit_Pioneers/

A new take on Lemmings, dig deep to find the cause of the recent earthquakes. You have a bunch of diggers, all moving nonstop until you give them a job to do, even if that means falling to their deaths. I’m not a fan of fast‑paced games where you have to micromanage a chaotic crew, so I didn’t play much of it, but it does seem well-made.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2302320/Poke_ALL_Toads/

The title says it all: you must poke all toads. More seriously, the goal is indeed to poke all the toads in each level and then reach the exit with the blue fairy. But while sleepy frogs will merely wake up, already awake frogs don't like to be poked and will try to eat you, so the goal is to either find a way to block their view of you, or to trick them into eating a different fairy. While it does have a real-time aspect to it, it is excellently used: it’s not too speedy, and it really adds to the thinky challenge.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4025180/The_Portsmoor_Abysm/

Supaplex/Boulder Dash with a horror theme. You must dig dirt, touch idols, dodge boulders, and outsmart hellish creatures, then safely reach the exit. The speed of the game is quite relaxed; you have a bit of time to think about your actions. At the end of each chapter, there’s a boss level, with a powerful enemy to defeat.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3756940/The_Ratline/

A detective game about uncovering the identities of ex-Nazis hiding throughout the world under new identities. It’s similar to The Roottrees are Dead, with articles to read, photos to look at, phone calls to make, and databases to search for keywords. You have to follow people through time, see through their intentional name changes, and unintentional face changes as they age, connect seemingly unrelated articles and photos, recognize that you’ve seen a name a few cases ago, go back and dig up past evidence for clues you missed because they were not related to the case at that time. Although presented as separate cases, one each day, they are all interconnected, with characters from one day appearing in other days as well, documents from one case being relevant again for a later case, and symbols from an older photo starting to make sense once you get their meaning in a future case. You don’t just solve neatly separated cases, but you untangle a big conspiracy one thread at a time. It’s a very good detective game, with a great story and theme.

And the Rest:

• The Case of Arcadia Springs (detective, interactive fiction, multiple endings)
  
  
• Cozy Cats Fit (block puzzle, logic): A simple block puzzle with a cat theme.
  
  
• Dungeon-Doku (sudoku, logic): Sudoku with a dungeon theme. Instead of numbers, you have to place monsters, but the rules are the same: only one monster of each type in a row, column, or sub-grid.
  
  
• eethCross (nonogram, logic)
  
  
• Fuse (3D puzzle platformer, exploration, action, adventure, free): A short and free, but decent puzzle game in which you control two origami creatures, a pillbug and a mantis, each with their abilities.
  
  
• Line of Taste - Pizza Crust (factory builder, restaurant simulator, early access): Build pizza making factories, placing down conveyor belts that move the pizza between different ingredient dropping machines, then cook and serve the pizza to the customers.
  
  
• Little Chef: Cozy Cooking (cooking, cozy, physics, early access): A funny cooking game, play around in a kitchen, making food or causing chaos, it’s up to you.
  
  
• Pixel Forge (factory builder, programming, logic): Build pixel graphics by combining programming blocks. A kind of factory builder, but instead of conveyor belts carrying materials, you connect graphical functions with wires. Neat concept.
  
  
• SpaceShift (puzzle platformer)
  
  
• Tammuz: Blood & Sand (puzzle box, VR-only)
  
  
• Upstairs (point&click adventure)
  
  
• Wriggle apple 3 (pathfinding, snake))The third entry in the series, in just as many weeks, this time set in the desert.

And a heads up for the games covered in the next newsletter: SokoGhost: Unfinished Business, a sokoban in which you are a ghost that can go through walls, The Red Pearls Of Borneo, a good detective game steeped in history, the cozy Looking Up, the new edition of the giant minesweeper 2025: Mosaic Retrospective, the multi-cube roller The Cubes, the word unscrambler Come Again, Chachii, and a new Supaplex game, Supaplex in Solaris.

If you have 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.

Free Game Highlights:

• Blockade Runner (strategy, point&click)
  
• ChessBoyChess (board game)
  
• Simulation Requires Supervision (hidden object, exploration)

Paid Games - Now Free:

• Dice Eater: A Supernatural Mystery Card Game (card game)
  
• Liekki (platformer)

New Content:

Biped 2 added more puzzles.

Highlighting a short and free puzzle game every week!

This week’s pick is a different kind of “game”: a cryptic paper puzzle from Jane Street (not a sponsor). You’re given an image packed with three-letter words and a list of crossword-style clues, and your goal is to discover a single one-word solution. Figuring out how to tackle it was really fun! There are multiple stages, each building cleverly on the previous solution. The only downside is that it does require a strong English vocabulary. Give it a try, and if you need a few hints, don’t hesitate to ask in our Steam Group Chat or on the No Clue Discord. It works in a browser, on a phone, or can even be printed out on paper.

Highlighting another free puzzle game every week!

A puzzle platformer in which you have to help a fish reach the water. The title of the game is referencing the “conservation of mass” law, which also applies to the main mechanic of the game: you can swap places with another object of equal mass. This is like a teleportation, you can move two tiles away, even through obstacles, as long as there is another object of the same size you can swap places with. It’s not too long, but it has some neat puzzles in there. Works in a browser, even on a phone.

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.