We’re living in a wonderful period for puzzle games. Seemingly everyone, from The New York Times to Linkedin, has fun puzzles to play, so every morning I have plenty of options to accompany my first coffee of the day. Lately, though, much of my daily puzzle time has come from an unlikely source: the Playdate.
Panic’s little yellow handheld is best known for being home to oddball indie games you can’t find anywhere else, many of which utilize a crank to play. But it has also amassed a library of excellent puzzle games that are playable in quick bursts. It makes it easy to stick a Playdate in your pocket and grab it when you need to kill a few minutes; this is particularly useful if you’re someone, like me, who is actively trying to avoid reaching for your phone in those moments. Here are a few of my recent favorites.
Like the Playdate itself, Lexgrid feels like something from an alternate universe. It’s sort of like a word search crossed with a crossword puzzle. In each level you’re tasked with finding a series of words in a grid of letters. The twist is you are given a clue as to what the word is you need to find, instead of the word itself. Complicating things even further is that the clues can mean different things; as you progress, you’ll uncover different symbols, each of which has a particular meaning. One might require you to find the opposite of the clue word, another will have you seeking out a synonym. They’re kind of like modifiers for words.
The symbols get more complex and strange the further you go, but the really tricky part is that you get no actual instructions. Instead, you have to figure it all out on your own. This is both the best and worst part of Lexgrid; it feels incredible when you solve a particularly obscure puzzle, but there were plenty of times I found myself struggling. Thankfully, the game generally gives you multiple puzzles to solve at once, so you can bounce around whenever you’re stuck.
Togglebot, meanwhile, reminds me of an even more lo-fi take on Nintendo’s Boxboy series. You play as a little guy in a black-and-white world, and your job entirely is to flip some switches to get to the next level, where you flip some more switches. Those levels are bite-sized and limited to a single screen, but are still (almost always) very satisfying to solve.
You have a very limited array of options at your disposal; really, all you can do is push some boxes and switches around, and change color by entering into weird portals. These are important because you can only walk on squares when you are the opposite color. This simplicity in terms of both moves and mobility means the levels require a great deal of spatial awareness to solve, and for me at least, quite a bit of experimentation. Luckily there’s a rewind button that encourages you to try things out with no repercussions.
I also love What Time Is It? Few games have such a perfectly descriptive title. It’s like a puzzle book where each page is a single image, and from that you have to determine the time of day. It could be a string of numbers, or a bunch of playing cards, or maybe even just a single word. And from there you have to work out what time it is. There is a hint system, but for the most part it’s just you staring at an image and trying to determine what it’s telling you. Inputting the time means turning the Playdate’s crank to adjust a watch, which is a fun twist, and the 50 included puzzles can be solved in any order you want. Which is good, because some of these are tough. But again, that makes your eventual victory all the more gratifying.
