First off, I'm going to limit it to versions that are generally available on modern PCs. If you're going to be setting up a console emulator for Retroachievements or running the original on 486 hardware, I assume you know what you're doing.

That still leaves three options for Myst, in increasing order of price:

• Myst Masterpiece Edition: Basically the classic slideshow version with minor graphics/audio updates.
• realMyst Masterpiece Edition: A 3D adaptation that lets you walk around freely rather than being locked to specific nodes (but snapping to nodes is an option). The graphics are a bit dated, though.
• Myst (2021): A remake with more modern graphics, VR support, and new accessibility options like subtitles. I'll admit I haven't actually played this one myself.

Puzzle-wise, the base game content of all three of these are identical. (The remake added a puzzle randomizer option if that's something you're interested in) realMyst added a small bonus area in the post-game ("Rime"), and the 2021 remake expanded on it.

So if you're a slideshow purist, Myst Masterpiece Edition is there for you. realMyst is probably good enough if you're price-conscious and don't need the extra graphical fidelity or features, and the remake is the newest and fanciest.

There are only really two commercially available versions of Riven:

• Riven (1997) is the original game with a wrapper around it to let it run on modern machines.
• The Riven remake from 2024, in addition to being in 3D, added some stuff, made changes to the overall game flow, and tweaked some puzzles.

I played the remake myself recently, and even remembering how everything from the original game worked there was enough new stuff that I still had stuff to solve and enjoyed the experience. However, some of the puzzle tweaks did simplify certain aspects, so I can't say there's zero reason to play the original. If the price tag's a concern for you, or you're interested in seeing the original version of the puzzles, the original version still holds up.

Uru was Cyan's attempt to make an online Myst game, and if you're wondering how that worked it kind of didn't. It launched in beta, was canceled, released the content in the pipeline as single-player expansions, found a new publisher for a second online run, got canceled again, and now lives as an open-source server with a small but dedicated community making new stuff 20 years later. I think there's interesting stuff to see there, but it having an actual physics engine for the MMO bits led to them doing some platforming and physics puzzles/challenges which weren't really great and turned off a lot of people that would be interested in the adventure game parts.

Anyway, there are two paths to check it out:

• Uru: Complete Chronicles, the single-player game plus the expansions from the interregnum period.
• Myst Online, a free client that connects to the open-source server with all the content from the second online period and some ages fans have made since then. (This isn't quite a superset of Complete Chronicles- a few things never made it to Online, and at least one puzzle was changed to require multiple people)

In my opinion, Complete Chronicles is a more coherent single-player experience, due to the missing puzzles and being able to have a clearer endpoint than Online does. (well, one ending for the base game and one for each of the two expansions) And while I haven't been following the hardcore modding scene for fan content that hasn't made it to Online, my understanding is that that all requires CC as a base.

So my high-effort recommendation is to play Complete Chronicles and then if you want you can check out the online-exclusive content afterwards as a bonus. (You can't import progress or anything, but you won't have to repeat much of the single-player stuff unless you want the cosmetic rewards for having finished it. (yes there are cosmetic rewards)) Alternately you can just do everything online and see almost everything, with co-op available and mostly optional if you have someone you want to explore with.

This will contain some general spoilers about the structure of the hunt, especially Land With No Name.

I hunt with Up Late, a mix of some Boston area/MIT people and some people from a variety of teams around the Seattle puzzling scene. There's been varying levels of remote presence in Seattle from year to year, where it's been nice to hang out and work with people I'd more often be competing against. But some of that crowd's been flying out to hunt in person, and this year things worked out that I was able to join them.

Thursday night I met up with a few teammates to do an escape room, U-Boat at Red Fox Escapes. I don't do enough escape rooms to compare, but I had a good time. (Apparently Body Shop at the same place is also really good)

Friday I braved the cold to head over to the classroom we'd be working in, then over to watch the opening skit. The hunt was off-brand Pokemon (Puzzmon) themed, and the website came with a little game we could wander around in to unlock puzzles. I only really got to work with the app in the first "kingdom" (area/round), since there was so much other stuff going on as later ones showed up. But it was the bird-themed one, so it's all good. We got a lute to play songs in the game to get birds to carry you around, and I enjoyed a little minipuzzle where you had to play a few Zelda songs on it as well.

Curiously, instead of more traditional metapuzzles the kingdoms each had a "capstone" puzzle that used data from the not-Pokedex that unlocked as we solved each puzzle, rather than their answers. (It's funny how in my meta talk I mentioned tokenized metas not really being a thing MIT does...) But that meant that we couldn't backsolve those puzzles as we got their metas, and there was a cap of eight (increased later) puzzles unlocked at a time, so "useless" puzzles we were stuck on were starting to clog up our cap...

What opened things up after unlocking a few capstones was discovering a new type of round, a "dimension." We were forewarned that the dimensions were harder and weirder than the kingdoms, and the first one certainly qualified: the Land With No Name. When we first unlocked the round, all 26 of its puzzles were available, but all of the letters were blanked out. However, some puzzles were mostly images so they could still be solved in that state, so when we got our first answer it revealed the letter Q in all of the puzzles. That made more puzzles solvable, revealing more letters, and so forth. They did a really good job of having puzzles whose difficulty would scale in different ways based on the number of letters you had, from ones that would be trivial if you had everything so the challenge was to get them as soon as possible, to ones that would be difficult but solvable with any number of letters (even 0). We weren't quite able to finish off the metapuzzle, but we understood it enough to backsolve the last two puzzles with 24/26 answers, so I consider that a moral victory.

(It's also funny how in my meta talk I also talked about cryptogram-type things gradually revealing a letter at a time as a good meta structure.)

And then there kept just being more stuff. As we solved more capstone puzzles we unlocked two more dimensions that I didn't do as much with: Hyperbolic Space, which had normal puzzles along with twelve completely blank puzzles you had to backsolve, and Atlas of Mosaics, which was all collaborative hexagon tile assembly that always seemed to have people working on it and having a good time. We eventually found out why the capstone puzzles didn't use answers as we unlocked a set of metapuzzles that used the puzzles from the kingdoms (but didn't tell you which puzzles go with which meta).

So there was a lot of stuff you could do in parallel:

• Solving "easier" Kingdom puzzles
• Solving weirder and/or more-difficult Dimension puzzles
• Doing tasks to get more research points
• Solving Kingdom capstone puzzles
• Solving Kingdom metapuzzles
• Continuing to beat our head against the Land With No Name metapuzzle

I mostly focused on metas and capstones, occasionally popping into regular puzzles to help out or if something fit with my interests.

By the time Hunt HQ closed down Sunday night, we'd solved 6/9 capstones and 7/8 of the Kingdom metapuzzles. (sorry) We could've hinted that last meta, but we didn't really know if that was going to lead to a meaningful thing or if we also needed the capstones. The last couple years have had some sort of "early hunt" milestone that led to an on-campus runaround or interaction, and I was hoping to at least get there, but this year there were a lot more puzzles to get there.

At wrapup, the organizers said that having a variety that people could choose whatever seemed interesting was a goal of theirs, so I guess they succeeded on that front. But if you had a goal other than completing the hunt, it was hard to know which of those things would get you there. For instance, there weren't even three Dimensions: there were actually six, three of which we never unlocked. I had to ask around afterwards to find out what we would've needed to do to see the rest. Some of their gimmicks seemed interesting, but since my team doesn't avoid spoilers and solve the rest of the hunt online afterwards like some do, I likely won't get to experience them.

I also made the mistake that a lot of first-time on-campus people do and mostly did solving in the room with people, only going out for food/sleep runs and one late-night drop by Hunt HQ to pick up a few items. In my defense, they did drastically change how in-person events worked this year, having a lot of events that showed up in a long list of "research tasks" as you unlocked them rather than having a separate page up front with all of them.

But I did have a great time overall. We solved a lot of puzzles, the hunt did a lot of stuff well, and being on campus for the first time is a milestone for me. I might have an addendum with some puzzles I liked when they're available publicly (other than the entire Land With No Name round, heh).

• Meticulous Microbes update, with new puzzles and a little QoL
• The Musing on Metapuzzles blog series, and a ThinkyCon talk about it
• Safari Logic, basically a paper puzzle, for the Thinky Puzzle Game Jam
• Bow Bird's Mine Ride, a first PICO-8 project, for the GMTK Game Jam
• Check For Traps, a platformer, for Pizza Jam
• Energy Excavation, the one actually new puzzle game, for Confounding Calendar

The one interesting prototype I did was for the "Collector" Ludum Dare- didn't get anywhere puzzle-wise but I did find a bug in the version of PuzzleScript Next I was using, so it wasn't a total waste.

Some more thoughts below the link:

Of the longer-term projects I mentioned this time last year, the Meticulous Microbes update is the only one that actually came out in any respect. My secret goal with that was to give it enough content and polish that I'd feel good submitting it to Mystery Tournament, and I don't think I got there. I'm happy to have gotten something out the door, but I haven't really been able to buckle down and focus on any bigger game projects since then. The blog posts count as something bigger, I guess. I'll try to find some other ways to scope things a little bigger than a jam game.

Working with PICO-8 was fun, and Check For Traps came out okay, so I'd definitely try out non-puzzle stuff if I can think of ways to make it "me." Art's still a limiting factor for me, and is going to be more so for those projects- low-res pixel art like the PuzzleScript games is the most I can do on my own, and it's not exactly high quality. I could look into asset packs, or maybe even returning to text... Plus, I may want to find some more general gamedev communities- the thinky Discords are great but not as useful for action projects.

What more can I say about Blue Prince? I said a bunch of it back when it came out, and I kind of alluded to it a lot during my ThinkyCon talk... I want there to be more games like it, both in the "many layers of metapuzzles" way and in the "puzzle and strategy layers combining" way. Maybe both of those at once didn't work for some people, but it worked for me.

The Descent of King Hesper technically didn't come out in 2025, but it came out so close to the end of 2024 that I'm counting it. It's a massive multi-year fan level set for the Deadly Rooms of Death puzzle series, initially designed as an "entry point" with a level to introduce each mechanic the game system supports. And over the years, that's a lot of mechanics.

Lingo 2 is more of the combination of word rules discovery and exploring impossible spaces that made the first game so enthralling. There's a lot in there on both sides of that coin, and it got pretty overwhelming, but I enjoyed what I was able to see. As a sequel to a rules discovery game, it had an interesting design of challenge of having to work for people who played the first game and knew all of its rules as well as people who don't, and it changed things up just enough to succeed.

Gentoo Rescue is a grid-based puzzle about sliding penguins and walruses around on ice. The twist is that creatures have items that break the rules and interact in interesting ways, and of course the level select is another level that follows the same rules as the main puzzles, so there are "meta" mechanics of interactions between them... There have been a bunch of these since Baba is You, but this one did a really good job of not being overwhelming with features like a journal of mechanic interactions you've seen. It obviously gets Bird Game of the Year, but I think I give it Puzzle Game of the Year (For Sickos) too. It was a tough call between these first four games, though.

Glowkeeper starts off as a puzzle platformer with a kind of unique trick: you also have mouse control, which you can use to connect blocks and remove them match-3 style. But as the game progresses and you explore the world, it reveals some twists on its mechanics that give it a lot of staying power.

The Roottrees are Dead is another document exploration mystery, this one building a family tree of a candy-making dynasty and understanding their history. It has an interesting combination of ways to confirm you're on the right track: both Obra Dinn's "get three people right to lock in" and a database query (searching its simulation of the 90's Internet). The original free (AI art-based) release added them both to the detective game genre toolkit, and the commercial release with human art and a bonus campaign makes it something I can recommend without qualifications.

Strange Antiquities is a sequel to Strange Horticulture, where instead of a shop of mysterious plants you've got a shop full of mysterious artifacts to identify and give out. It's a nice iteration on the previous games, with some new mechanics that the new form factor allows. Plus there's a pettable cat and some cute Easter eggs.

Strange Jigsaws is a lovely little mishmash of puzzles, starting with jigsaws as a base and iterating on it in many different ways. Between its humor working for me, using something well-known to start with, and having a solid hint guide on the website. it gets my Puzzle Game of the Year (For Non-Sickos) award.

The Seance of Blake Manor looked like another investigation game, but it wound up triggering the adventure/visual novel side of my brain more. It ties together a bunch of different religions/mythologies of that era with an underlying Irish folklore in a really interesting way, and while unraveling the mysteries wasn't super challenging it was interesting.

Hollow Knight: Silksong is a large and well-done Metroidvania. I liked the first Hollow Knight and played the randomizer of it some, so it wasn't surprising that I enjoyed Silksong as well. There was a lot of discourse around difficulty, but I found the level of challenge reasonable (some parts of it I only got to after the post-launch nerfs, though).

I played most of Rhythm Doctor in its early access, but since it reached 1.0 this year it goes on this list. It's a one-button rhythm game where you press the button on beat 7 of the pattern it shows you. Of course, there are a bunch of tricks and twists to it, and handling multiple patterns at once, that makes it challenging as you go on. That plus the story that integrates with the songs and the gameplay well made it compelling for me.

I wasn't expecting Kirby Air Riders to be my GameCube-era nostalgia pick, but it had the chill multiplayer vibes that worked for me in the last few months. They did a good job of keeping the feel of the GameCube game with extra stuff throughout. The singe-player mode was the addition there that made it feel most worth it when I'm not going to be playing local multiplayer- it's not deep by any means, but it's cute and has some fun moments.

Some games that were on the bubble: Angeline Era (What it's doing is interesting, but I'm bad at it and not that far in), the Rise of the Golden Idol DLCs, Monster Hunter Wilds... this year was a lot. I'll probably do another wrap-up post of my gamedev projects this year as well, but that does it for the best stuff I played!

Games From The Past:

• I played a couple of the "Metroidvania" Castlevanias to see what that side of the genre inspiration was like, and both Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow were compelling in their own ways. Symphony was big and trying to figure out what the formula meant, and Aria added the soul mechanic to let people really go wild with having different builds based on what they found.
• I played quite a few document investigation type games this year, but Daemon Masquerade actually came out last year. This had a neat supernatural spin on the concept, since you're using your own power to summon documents about other characters to determine what their powers are.
• ZeroRanger was the highlight of my shmup arc this year, as the indie one everyone talks about. And there's a good reason for that- it's got great music and presentation, and solid gameplay with what I understand are a lot of shoutouts to other classics of the genre. I didn't beat what I assume is the final final boss for reasons, but I enjoyed the path to get there.
• Epigraph is probably the hardest of the language deciphering puzzle games I've seen. There's no context, no confirmation every time you get N words right: just a bunch of artifacts and a small note in English with a little starting point. But it's a fair challenge and one I found rewarding to untangle.
• Not For Broadcast is an FMV game with the twist that you're running a broadcasting studio, so everything's been recorded in four cameras and you're choosing which one to air, bleeping swears, and other live editing features. I assume the plot was originally done as a Brexit analogy, but playing through it now led to some parallels with the current political situation.

Games From The Future:

Early Access makes GotY lists kind of weird, but in this case I'm mostly using this category as an accounting trick to free up some slots in the annual top 10 list:

• Type Help is a "world's worst database" game about piecing together a story from fragments that you can only retrieve via an awkward interface. And as much as I hate the "just play it, go in with absolutely zero information" trope, it's hard to talk more about what sets this one apart without spoiling something you're supposed to figure out. It's fully text-based, which I know is a turn-off to some people, but it's getting a paid remake next year with voice acting, The Incident At Galley House (that's also my excuse for not putting it on the "this year" list).
• Deltarune chapter 3 and 4 were cool. Even without hunting down all the secret/hidden stuff, there's a lot of fun story and bosses and a lot of heart. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.
• The Void Rains Upon Her Heart remains one of my ongoing roguelikes I can always go back to, and the thing that eased me into shmups in the first place, so it'll probably be on this list until it officially releases. It's been in early access forever, with the dev adding more stuff frequently.

Games From Another 2025:

Here are some games that I probably would've enjoyed but I didn't get around to. Maybe we'll see them in the future.

• Citizen Sleeper 2
• Dawnfolk
• Everhood 2
• Kirby and the Forgotten Land: Star-Crossed World
• The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-
• Metroid Prime 4
• Monster Train 2
• Monument Valley 3
• Neyyah
• Puzzle Depot
• Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

I'll be back hopefully before the year ends with my top games that actually came out this year.

I'm honored to have it featured both in Draknek's Thinky Third Thursday and Bart Bonte's bontegames blog. Bontegames is probably the closest vibe I've gotten to Jayisgames of yore (especially since he's been around long enough that some of his games showed up there), so it's especially cool to see it there.

Some mildly spoilery design thoughts below the jump:

There's a Zelda inspiration in my previous Calendar entries, but the diagonal digging mechanic in this one comes from Lode Runner. The limited energy mechanic and dug ground never regenerating were my attempts to put a thinkier twist on it... as well as adding something for the secret mechanic which also comes from that series.

I consider these sort of a "series" with some common design themes: the side view with gravity and ladders, having a core mechanic other than block pushing, some sort of secret... I know people like these, but I'm also a little worried about running out of ideas that work with it. (ending this series at four also makes sense for thematic reasons) Maybe I'll try something different in the future?

I've tried making a few action-y things in Godot, but this is the first one that got to a point I'd consider shippable. Part of it is using the engine enough to know how to shape it to the way I want to work- for instance, a big thing I did early was setting up screenscroll and stuff so I could build the levels as one continuous TileMap when my brain's in "level design" mode.

Of the ranked jams I've tried out, this is the smallest one by far, so I'm curious how that'll affect the vibe of the rating/feedback period. The big limitation is I can't post about it in the devvy Discords I'm on since they're all for puzzle games, so I'm kind of at the mercy of Bluesky and the jam page for anyone actually seeing it.

• 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.

(and yeah, I'm doing the "new game announcement in lieu of monthly update" thing again, a few more thoughts on this one below the Read More)

I mentioned a while back that I was looking into PICO-8 stuff, and "what if Zelda was a bird (and primarily an archer)?" was the idea I was thinking about exploring with it. I didn't get too far with it at the time, but when this jam came around I realized I could use the minecart thing as an additional scope limiter.

PICO-8's an interesting platform for developing to limitations. (Not that I got too close to them- the map would fit 32 levels, a lot more sprites, and I only used 15% of the code space limit without doing any optimization.) Having the sprite, map, and audio editors built in is kind of neat, and it let me do more with audio than I've done in the past. And I got to implement my own collision detection, which is interesting if a little janky.

Could there be more Bow Bird adventures in the future? I don't want to make promises, but I liked making this and could probably reuse some of this codebase.