Reccomend a puzzle game

It’s not exactly a Puzzle game, more like a digital interpretation of a board game that does things you can only do digitally: Slay the Spire. It’s addictive and fun and has minimal system requirements.

Also, if you liked Portal, there was a game done by one of its designers called Quantum Conundrum. It has a similar vibe but is very different.

The Nancy Drew games.

Also a really fun game.

Q.U.B.E. 2 is free on Amazon games if you have a Prime subscription.

Here is a word puzzle game by Emily Short, Counterfeit Monkey. You may download it or play online. Basically you have to manipulate objects in various ways to advance; for example, if you need a ticket, you can make one if you see a thicket and have a letter remover.

Nice one. Can I have a hint?

What do I do when stuck in the car in the center of the roundabout? As soon as I leave the car, the officer shoots me. And from the inside I can hardly do anything,

Nevermind, got it.

Somehow, you can put the cop’s restorator rifle back to the statue without leaving the car.

I started this - and then I found a cheat site (that made it go a lot smoother, because I have a low frustration tolerance for games). And then I hit a part where I had to do far too much (even knowing the cheats) and so I stopped.

It’s an interesting idea. And I liked a lot of the puzzles. And I wish I knew how it ended - but not enough to actually finish it.

I played Monument Valley on my android phone. I enjoyed it. It was pretty huge, though, so I uninstalled it after I finished it.

At the other end, a really tiny (and free) android package of games is Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection.

None of the have great graphics or interface, but some of the puzzles are excellent. And some are off-beat. For instance, someone took the fou-color problem and created a puzzle game from it – fill this randomly generated map with no more than 4 colors. It can be challenging.

but all of these are simple puzzles, no plot, no pretty pictures, no characters.

Just curious: what is the nature of these cheats? There are sites with clues and walkthroughs, of course, but those are also available for Portal, and this is Portal with words, as it were. You could also write a computer program to list all possible words you can make given the transformations available; that is not really a cheat IMO if you do the work yourself, more of a cheat if you simply look up a list of all words in the game online. IIRC that kind of exhaustive enumeration is never necessary, though, at least not in this game.

Note that you can play either in easy or in hard mode, and that the game is not super short— it can easily take a total of 8-10 hours to finish.

Huh. It is possible to get out of the car, though, if you make it seem like a real car. I don’t remember what, if anything, happens if you just stay in the car, or that it is possible to do anything while sitting inside the car.

the one that I found was a walk through with hints that you had to click through.
So it said things like:

look closely at the

was there something from that could be used here?

use the remover on the and put it in the

or something like the hint you gave kk_fusion. followed by the explicit instructions on what to do.

For me, this came up in the very beginning when I

saw the thicket, knew I had to change it into a ticket, and then spent 20 minutes trying to find some way to cut it out of the ground so that I could change it. For me, figuring out what words to change to what other words was kind of fun. Figuring out what room/building to find the right things to change was not. And bouncing back and forth between spaces was even less (I quit at a section that had a lot of go here, now go here, now go back to place 1, now go somewhere you’ve already been, now go back to place 1 again, now go back to place 2. And there’s more! That is not for me.)

I also got too frustrated to make it through Portal - I keep hearing amazing things about it, but the game that I played was just not fun.

Sounds like the ‘invisiclues’ page

I guess you know this, but you can manipulate more or less any object in sight, subject to the rules; no need to cut it out first. Also many (most?) objects in the game are optional; it is just fun messing around as much as possible. You do not need the ticket at all in fact, and can just pay cash to get in the cinema.

You can also have the game highlight all (or almost all? I think I found one where it didn’t) the words, whenever you want to or all of the time.

When I played, finding stuff was not so much of an issue— the game does a good job of keeping you informed of what you should be trying to do at any moment, and of course I did my best to grab every highlighted object I possibly could. But it is true that, not having played through the game before, I ended up exploring a bit and also had to do a bit of back-and-forth travel a couple of times because it turned out I overlooked something through inattention. I also would not be surprised if the author did turn out to be a fan of Portal, by the way. Not that there is a direct link, but there is a room near the end of the game with deliberate Portal-style imagery.

Now I need to find the time to try the game in hard mode and see how it is…

tldr your criticisms are fair, and I understand what you mean about aspects of the game turning you off, but (again IMO) I thought the game was well-enough designed to minimize those frustrating issues, even though it may never be everyone’s cup of tea. Awesome word manipulation in any case, though

And to the converse - I can see why people like the game. It had good world building and was an interesting thought experiment. It’s definitely worth giving it a try.