Thinky Games

, 28 August 2026 Hillthorn is a card-based detective mystery that just debuted a new trailer at the Gamescom Future Games Show and revealed a rough release date only a few months away. Sometime in November we'll get the full release of this gloomy whodunnit that features many familiar thematic trappings built on a pretty unusual mechanical framework. Here's the new trailer: A secluded village perched deep in the hills, wary villagers watching with suspicious glares, a missing innocent child...

, 26 August 2026 In preparation for this year’s Mysterium—the annual Myst fan convention—I played a lot of first-person adventure games. I wasn’t just trying to bone up in case someone at the con ambushed me with a pop quiz, though. I was trying to answer a deep philosophical question, one Myst fans have been arguing over since the game exploded onto the PC game market back in 1993, and the homages and imitators started flooding in. What is Myst’s legacy?

, 25 August 2026 Formed in part by the members of indie studio Nozomu Games, who we've connected and worked with in the past (they've even made a Confounding Calendar game), a new publisher has arrived in our corner of the indie games world: Inner Pocket has the self-described mission of publishing "curiosity games" and bringing small, worthy titles to a wider audience.

, 23 August 2026 A short teaser trailer accompanied the recent announcement that another puzzle book from designer Blaž Urban Gracar will be making the move to the interactive digital realm. Following in the footsteps of LOK Digital from 2024, Workworkwork will now have a new version we can presume will be coming to Steam and mobile in the near future.

, 21 August 2026 Around the time I first started writing for Thinky Games, I was offered the opportunity to review the demo for Servant of the Lake. Unfortunately for me, it had been so long since I’d played any of the games that I didn’t feel my patchy memory would do the piece justice. Anyone remotely familiar with the series will know that it boasts a deliciously rich, if not completely bonkers, narrative, so it really benefited the expertise of someone more informed.

, 15 August 2026 This will be the fourth time that the grant, organized and backed by Alan Hazelden's puzzle game studio, will return to provide funding to developers from underrepresented groups to make thinky games. The New Voices grant gives $15,000 in funding and a year's mentorship to creators who are making interesting puzzle games and also come from backgrounds, regions and lifestyles that are not proportionally represented in the profession of videogame developers.

, 14 August 2026 The Birdwatcher's Journal is coming to Steam in the near future, in which you'll explore an island in first person, cataloguing the bird species and any other strange things you encounter... After arriving by boat, you'll traverse the landscape taking Polaroids and then deducing where they fit in the titular journal. But what's up with these strange symbol-scrawled ruins and freestanding stone portals?

, 13 August 2026 Puzzle games are often built around one core mechanical feature or concept, a sort of scaffolding that the rest of the game can run wild with, branch off of in all sorts of directions and take to its logical conclusions. In Backpack Boy, this central conceit is that the beam of your flashlight (and other sources of light) can illuminate a sort of "parallel" level hiding within the one you can make out in the dark.

, 12 August 2026 The Rule-Discovery Paper Puzzle Jam starts on itch.io September 18th, and all you really need to know is in the name: participants have a relaxed week-long time period to spend 48 hours making image puzzles that teach the player without text instructions.

, 6 August 2026 Veteran studio Cyan who helped define early 3D puzzle games recently shared a trailer showing off a sort of scrapped project they worked on for months but eventually cancelled, giving us a glimpse at a Myst universe game that won't see the light of day: Anglerfish.