Cool games I saw at PAX / SIX 2025

This weekend I was at PAX West as well as SIX, a show run by the local indie dev community nearby. In no particular order, here are some games that caught my eye:

  • The Maze Gallery- A very weird interactive fiction piece about exploring a surreal museum. This was released for free in the big annual IF Competition last year, and I'm not sure what their plans for it are beyond that, but it's cool to see something so off the wall in here.
  • Lancer Tactics - A video game adaptation of the mech combat tabletop RPG Lancer. I got a PDF of the RPG rulebook a while ago and it looks super interesting, but I'd never be able to get a group together to play/run it, so this seems like a great way to do it.
  • Super Dungeon Designer - Level editor to make and share your own 2D Zelda-inspired dungeons. There've been a few of these, so I'm hoping one of them is able to catch on more broadly. Though personally I prefer the Game Boy Zelda aesthetic to the Link to the Past one, bringing me to...
  • Draco and the Seven Scales - Game Boy-styled Zelda-liked with pirates. It didn't need much more than that to sell me on it.
  • Song of Maka - Adventure puzzle game where you play as a bird. This is another one where personal biases won me over immediately.
  • Chaos Coin - Roguelike deckbuilder except the deck's a bag of coins. (Full disclosure: I know the dev of this one from a couple Discords)
  • Master of Piece - Roguelike deckbuilder with a little bit of grid-based autobattler in there. The demo seemed interesting, and allowed for some fun combinations with the upgrades you could put on individual units.
  • Touhou Danmaku Maze - Arcade maze chase but it's Touhou, so there's bullet hell to dodge while you're collecting dots or whatever. I still have next to no experience with the mainline shmups, but I love seeing the fanbase do weird stuff with the series.

I'm not sure how much to say about other parts of the event since a lot of it's kind of the same every year. One thing I hadn't seen before was a very cool set of original art pieces from old Nintendo Powers. But overall it's still a good time, and I liked tracking down some possible indie gems.

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Monthly update: March 2025

The theme this month was to close out some loose ends: posting the rest of the metapuzzle blog series, as well as publishing the post-jam update for Meticulous Microbes. (10 new puzzles, save functionality, and some other QoL stuff)

No idea what the next month or two's going to look like dev-wise since I'm busy with other stuff. Ludum Dare this weekend's tempting, but it's a long shot whether I'll have time for it.

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Musings on metapuzzles, part 3: Resource metas in puzzle games

At the start of this I defined metapuzzles as being about collecting information or resources, but as I bring it around to actually talking about puzzle games I'll flip the order and talk about resources first.

This'll have some extremely minor early spoilers for Talos Principle 1 and Bonfire Peaks, and significant spoilers for the Hall of Innovation and Factory Floor rounds from the 2023 MIT Mystery Hunt.

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