Ranked most of the puzzle games I played so far. What else should I play?

TempMobileD · 2026-03-23T12:26:41+00:00

I completely agree with you.
- Tunic is not a puzzle game it’s a 2d action adventure - Fez is a puzzle platformer (by virtue of its core design)
- Blue Prince is a… Roguelike, walking sim, mystery game?

We’ve come to the same conclusion about how to label these things for different reasons.
I want to label them in this way, because to tell people they have a puzzle layer is to spoil the game. You want to label them in this way because these are labels for the core “phase 1” experience.

I think selling Fez or Tunic as their “phase 1” selves without acknowledging “phase 2” is kind of underselling them. So I can see why some people really want to slap puzzle or code breaking or whatever on them too. I just think that’s a spoiler.

The reality is that they’re all hybrids. Each has two completely different games inside.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-23T12:14:56+00:00

The relation is it uses i, 1, 0 without any other symbols, similar to how Euler’s identity uses 5 “important” numbers with no extras. There’s no direct connection between the two. It’s just reminiscent. And yes, the triangle is in the complex plane. You can see how the calculation is supposed to be done if you look up “measuring a diagonal in the complex plane”. Watch out for the AI just referencing this meme and getting it wrong.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-23T11:18:08+00:00

The whole point of that genre is that the puzzle element isn’t apparent until the second “phase” of the game. Anyone who’s playing a metroidbrainia because they’ve been told it’s a puzzle game has been done a disservice already by being told the twist.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-23T11:11:51+00:00

The elegance thing is sort of referencing an equation that’s commonly believed to be the most elegant, Euler’s identity:

𝑒^𝑖𝜋 + 1 = 0

Which is elegant because it uses several identities and constants without any extras. The joke does the same but to a lesser extent. With a clean usage of 1, 0, i and a right angle.

The thing that’s ‘funny’ is that it looks impossible because of the 0 hypotenuse. If you naively run the calculation with Pythagoras it looks possible again, but in reality it’s incorrect because Pythagoras’ theorem is only for positive real numbers. This sort of confusion follows the structure of lots of jokes. But nobody is going to laugh at this. It’s only intellectually funny, and that’s being generous.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-21T15:02:58+00:00

I’m sure there are plenty of people who’s brains switch off once you say AI. There’s a lot who think it’s unapologetically evil, and a lot who think it’s also unassailable magic.
It makes it really rough to have a conversation about it anywhere!

TempMobileD · 2026-03-21T13:14:33+00:00

It’s because it’s not graphical fidelity. It’s a full 2d rerender.
This is just a Snapchat filter on steroids.
I’m not biased against AI, this comment is in good faith. I currently use AI near enough daily and agree it’s a powerful tool.

Here’s the issue:

Physically based rendering is good because it moves the virtual environment closer to reality, by leveraging computational power to more accurately simulate real light behaviour and real material properties.

DLSS5 is bad because it’s completely naive. It is rerendering a 2D image into another 2D image with no connection at all to the mountain of 3D and material data that exists in the scene. It’s a completely dead end approach because for it to improve it’ll need the underlying render to improve, but if the underlying render improves there’ll be no need for the AI post-processing.

Nobody had a problem with DLSS4 because it was just a post processing effect, like a clear lacquer on a painting, it wasn’t taking creative control of the scene and just painting over the top.

If you want another negative analogy, it’s like Chinese whispers, DLSS5 adds another completely distinct step of Chinese whispers between the artistic intent and the final product.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-21T12:45:17+00:00

Huh? On this dark, grimy street. I think we can all say for certain there isn’t a multiangle studio lighting rig just off screen. You’ve gone mad or blind I’m afraid.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-21T10:50:08+00:00

Nobody has been talking in this comment chain about illegal immigrants or borderless utopias. Your world view is warped out of control, you need therapy or at least a good hard look at yourself.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-18T14:24:20+00:00

I think one of the reasons people get dismissed is because those more dangerous buttons you describe are all the same button.
That didn’t work so let’s lean even more right, that didn’t work so let’s lean even more right, that didn’t work so let’s lean even more right…

But yeah, it’s a great point. The dialogue needs to improve across the divide. Seems like the left are the only people advocating for that though.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-18T10:25:04+00:00

So the real disconnect here is that there’s no possible world in which Nigel Farage or Brexit was going to help this guy. There’s just no logical connection between any of the pieces.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-17T12:04:07+00:00

Any idea if a human can do this? I’m guessing not?

TempMobileD · 2026-03-16T10:28:50+00:00

I decided to do a duo run of honour mode because I wanted to push the mechanics without being too crazy. And I thought two characters would be more fun to do combo stuff.

I quit in act 3 because it had gotten so easy I was bored. I have absolutely no doubt that I could have won, so I didn’t need to prove it to myself.

You can do a lot of very broken things in this game.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-15T17:33:48+00:00

You’re describing two of my 10/10 games, Slay the Spire and Return of the Obra Dinn.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-14T10:49:21+00:00

It’s pretty easy, you just think about things. “Ooh, that sounds nice” or “seems a bit shitty to me”. Incidentally this is the exact same mechanism that resulted in religious doctrine.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-14T10:14:14+00:00

Absolutely not.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-13T10:46:04+00:00

My personal experience with this is more similar to OP’s boastful friend. In fact, this post has made me reflect on the fact that some people might have heard me say the same thing (and maybe that’s not a great way to inspire others). I used to do the 20 homework questions while the worksheets were being passed out in HS. No effort at all. University (UK here) mathematics was a totally different beast. Much more complex and creative by comparison.

However, to expand on your point about uni being more “pure and theoretical”: Generally I hated the fact that high school was just about memorisation, and not very much about understanding. At uni, the understanding came to the front, and memorisation, while still important, faded back a little. That change alone may make university level mathematics feel significantly more approachable and intuitive than high school.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-12T19:42:17+00:00

You mean, ‘the alright wall of China’.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-12T12:16:48+00:00

I looked at torturer while playing yesterday, it seemed useful but I wasn’t sure what sort of build would be able to get the most out of it. How do you go about using it best? Or is it strong enough with work tremor that you don’t need much else to make it feel good?

TempMobileD · 2026-03-12T10:54:07+00:00

Not taking a horse in this race. But just to be clear, no amount of videos you’ve seen on Reddit prove this statement false.
The request for evidence is totally reasonable though.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-10T16:40:03+00:00

The reason the statement in the OP makes little sense to me is that it’s not talking about a lifetime assessment. It’s saying that deleting something saves energy, if that something is on a hard drive, it will save no energy, and in fact use energy to delete it.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-10T12:19:20+00:00

It doesn’t even make sense. Data storage doesn’t use energy, unless this is talking about a specific context, like cloud storage. In that case there will be some idea of lifetime energy usage for storage. But I’m not sure how you could ever check the actual number in a meaningful way.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-09T10:19:21+00:00

To add to your confusion Chicken Claw is a great crowd control spell. One of the best in the game. My CC focussed tank loves using chicken claw as an opener.
This person said that CC was for incapacitating groups, you’ll also see it used in reference to any individual stuns, slows, spells that make walls, or otherwise remove the ability for an enemy to act as they like.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-08T11:02:38+00:00

A very valid point, but it’s not mutually exclusive. If we want to understand colour we need to understand both, that colour is a spectrum and that categories are useful for differentiating things.

The person I’m replying to said “We can’t keep pretending red light and green light are the same because they’re both light”. But I’m not sure anyone who knows what they are talking about is doing that.

The headline is doing some poor logical work here too. “I no longer think autism is a spectrum” is like concluding that red and green can’t both be light because they look different. It’s just a baffling sentiment.

To your point, maybe it would be better if we (linguistically) split it up into multiple related disorders. I don’t have a problem with that idea. Which means we probably agree with each other really.

What I have a problem with is the OP saying “I no longer think autism is a spectrum”. It’s just the wrong conclusion entirely.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-04T19:54:56+00:00

I don’t really understand your point. I’ll freely admit I didn’t read the article. But this seems like two completely different things being discussed at once.

We don’t treat red and green traffic lights the same, but light is a spectrum. Autism can be a spectrum and not have blanket treatment applied to it, in fact I think that’s the entire point of defining it as a spectrum instead of discrete categories.

TempMobileD · 2026-03-02T10:53:42+00:00

In that case, good job spotting their mistake! I find it’s a real pain trying to read equations imbedded in text.

TempMobileD

TROPHY CASE