I maintain that I am not really a fan of sokoban type puzzle games, and yet somehow, I seem to enjoy them. Perhaps it’s just when there are crate-pushing puzzles in otherwise crate-push-free games that I don’t like?

In any case, A Monster’s Expedition was one of the ones I did enjoy. You are a monster, who navigates islands which seem to make up a sort of Museum of Humans, as there are many artefacts (sometimes amusingly mislabelled as to their purpose) to be found. The game, however, isn’t about finding the artefacts – it’s about finding a way to leave the islands completely.

To do that you have to reach a ferry, and to reach the ferry you have to complete crate-pushing puzzles on each island in order to open paths, build log bridges, or make rafts to get around. Of course, they’re not crates you have to push: they’re trees.

You can chop down trees, then push the trunks as logs. If you push them sideways, they roll until they hit something or fall in the water, and if you push them lengthways they flip up on end and then over onto their side again. These, plus the double-height trees and some rocks, make up the majority of the puzzles and they’re all about trying to get logs into certain positions on each island to progress.

It’s simple, although many of the puzzles are not. Later on, you discover a few meta-puzzles, where there’s a collection of islands to solve, but not just to allow you to move between them – you have to make way for a log that needs to traverse the islands and bridges you’ve made too, which may mean the solution you had originally may not be enough for the log as well.

A Monster’s Expedition is a nice little (well, not little – it’s bloody huge) brain-scratcher, with a bit of humour and some fiendish puzzles. Oh, and if you’ve bought the itch.io Palestinian Relief bundle, you already own it!

It’s another Rusty Lake joint, like Samsara Room from the other day. It’s very similar in style, only the setting this time is, as the title might suggest, a hotel.

But not an ordinary hotel, oh no. This is one where a number of distinguished animal guests have been invited to attend several consecutive evenings of exquisite meals. Meals where one of the guests is the main course each night.

Your job is to kill each in turn, using standard point-and-click, escape room style mechanics. Poison a drink, behead an animal, that sort of thing, but how? By finding items and using them in clever ways in each one of the guest bedrooms. There’s the usual spotting patterns to trigger things type puzzles, finding keys, and so on, but with a macabre twist. It’s like Lord Winklebottom got a bit cannibally.

Button City is a cute little game about a fox who makes friends at a local arcade and becomes a member of a four player team of players of some sort of MOBA called “Gobabots”. The main plot is about trying to stop the arcade from being closed down, but there’s also story about the other characters in the game, many of whom have personal issues to overcome, and you can collect new robots to use as your avatar in the MOBA. Plus, you can actually play this team game and beat others to win prizes! The arcade also has a simple car racing game and a Dance Dance Revolution style machine you can play on (and challenge other characters at).

Much of Button City is spent doing simple fetch quests or helping folk out with tasks, like babysitting or passing notes between tenants in a block of flats, but the central Gobabots tournament also takes up much of the gameplay.

It’s full of quirky characters and sometimes very silly humour (a highlight being the Moustache Club), and I love the art style even if many of the reactions and expressions of characters appear to have been lifted directly from Animal Crossing. There’s a lot of depth and backstory to many of the animals you interact with and this gives them a lot of personality which really comes through even in the relatively short time the game lasts – around 6-7 hours.

It’s a clicker game! With cute fluffy things and you have to make all the fluff coins! You know how clickers work – click and collect coins, use them to buy things which collect them faster, and so on. There’s not much more to it than that… until… well, that’d be spoilers, yes?

Name	Samsara Room
Developer	Rusty Lake
Genre	Puzzle
Platform	PC, Mac, iOS, Android
Release Date	February 2017
Modes	Single-player
Languages	English
Website	Rusty Lake

Another rummage in my itch.io library, and up came this game. “Rusty Lake?” I thought. “Where have I heard that name before?”. Turns out, they also did The White Door, which I remember liking. Why not, eh?

It’s more abstract than that game, with very little in the way of words to help you. It’s essentially an Escape Room game, only something something something psyche something? I don’t know – there’s some symbolism and you turn into odd creatures and you have to collect shells or candles to get to the next room. Which is the same as the current room, only it’s like a parallel universe.

There are several of these room variants – like an upside down one and one where objects float in the air. Sometimes you need to solve a puzzle in one version of the room to make something happen in another version, so in that respect it’s a little like a very simplified and less brain-melty version of Gorogoa. That’s not a negative comment, I should point out.

I got stuck a few times, but it only took about an hour and a half to complete. That might sound short but that’s not the point, and it’s free. Free! Bargain.

(Oh, and check out that info box up there – WordPress AI created that for me. Not sure I’ll keep this sort of thing on other posts, but I’ll try it out for a bit.)