Unlike last year, my Thinky Puzzle Game entry this year is an interactive game: Garden of the Compass Rose.

This used DungeonScript, a fork of the PuzzleScript tool I've used before but in a first-person perspective, and I wanted to make a puzzle that leaned into that. Slightly more spoilery thoughts than usual below the break.

Myst and Riven are good, but there are so many versions of the former out there that it's a little confusing. After having the conversation about it in a few different Discords, I decided to put it all in one place (along with Uru because I think more people should at least try Uru):

Over MLK weekend, I was in Boston to participate in the MIT Mystery Hunt. I haven't really done writeups of it before, but I've got this blog now, and it was my first time there in person so that's something special.

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

Looking back on 2025, this was kind of a weird branching out year. Not a lot of puzzle game work, but a lot of other stuff:

• 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:

As I mentioned in the previous post, there were so many good games this year that it was hard to narrow it down to a top 10, leading to me disqualifying Type Help and Deltarune on technicalities to open up some slots. But I make the rules here, so I'm just going to add games to the list until I have what feels like a representative sample.