Thinky Third Thursday

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Thinky Third Thursday
February 2026

Welcome to the February 2026 edition of Thinky Third Thursday - a roundup of games that the puzzle experts from Draknek & Friends think are worth your time.

From the Draknek & Friends Official Podcast

  • A conversation with Adam Saltsman, the co-founder of Finji and the developer of CorgiSpace. Topics include the development of CorgiSpace, game design, despair about the industry, and PICO-8.
  • A conversation with Eli Rainsberry, the composer and sound designer of A Monster's Expedition, Saltsea Chronicles, Wilmot Works It Out, and more. Topics include how they got into the industry, the development of A Monster's Expedition, and how designing music for puzzle games is different from other games.

Recent thinky highlights


where's my egg?, by LevelClear
This game does exactly what it says on the egg shaped carton: A simple premise eggs-ecuted very well. Okay okay, yolks- I mean, jokes- aside, this game is a simple block pushing game elevated by really masterful level design. Your tools include blocks to push, lasers to open doors, and portals to do portally things. There are 62 eggs to find scattered across 62 levels to 'crack'.


TR-49, by inkle Ltd
Inkle loves a linguistic mystery, and to paraphrase Churchill, TR-49 is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma machine. The cold open on a mysterious basement immediately plunges you into perplexity, with only a flaky, non-committal voice on the other end of a radio for assistance. Everything takes place within the confines of a creaking piece of ageing technology, full of redacted documents, dead ends and red herrings.  You'll be part researcher, part archivist, part codebreaker as you connect the dots between Pride and Prejudice and bizarre occult literature, via the medium of snarky Fortean journals, gradually piecing together what happened to the machine's creators, and why the hell you're even in this basement to begin with.


Chromatic Conundrum, by Digs
A first person puzzler that has a unique enough twist to feel like its own thing compared to the many other games in that genre. The core mechanic of combining colours and casting shadows is genuinely clever, although reports indicate that it's fairly short and could have been pushed further. Despite this, its modest price makes it well worth spending some time with.


Bento Blocks, by SOMETIMES LIMITED
This game is lovingly illustrated and has a beautiful soundtrack to boot. With no time pressure or consequence for "wrong" answers, it does err on the easier side and won't offer much challenge to puzzleheads, but still well worth checking out. Shrimply charming, and now I suddenly have a craving for sushi too.


HER TREES : PUZZLE DREAM, by Stone
The HER TREES series is delightfully clever in how its central puzzle centres on anamorphic text. You're not just clicking around, you're dragging hand illustrated objects in space, and coaxing letters and numbers out of thin air whilst you do so. The full game builds well on the promise of its demo. In particular, fans of Rusty Lake and Madison Karrh's works will love this strange, uncanny world.

Thinky releases from the past month

Free games:

Paid games:

New demos:

Upcoming games to watch for

Can you feel it in the air? Steam Next Fest is around the corner, starting on Monday, and with it comes a deluge of new puzzle game demos. Here's just a few of the ones that caught our eye, plus a tease about what we've got coming soon (though not in Next Fest).


The Detective's Apprentice, by darqwerful
One of the demos we've been particularly excited for is from one of last year's Draknek New Voices Puzzle Grant recipients. In this game, you play Clementine "Cleo" Ace, apprentice to world-renowned detective Maya Lynch. In each case, you'll study the scene, interview the characters, and deduce just what happened, by whom, and how. It's surprisingly challenging and really makes you think outside the box - or rather, the case file.


Helix: Descent N Ascent, by Badass Mongoose
The first thing you notice about this game is its striking black and white hand-illustrated art style, and those immaculate vibes continue all across the mysterious world of Helix. In this demo you'll be given two unique powers - first one at a time and then together as more than the sum of their parts. The full game promises to introduce more powers, but more tantalisingly, also different combinations of abilities. I'm very interested to see what they have in store!


AntiMatcher, by GigoMakes, Dito Seregin
AntiMatcher is a particle physics-inspired puzzler that's wonderfully weird and unlike anything else I can think of. Your goal is to remove all the "antibubbles" by constructing structures that perfectly match their antimatter counterparts and colliding them together. It's a relatively short demo, but does a great job of letting you discover the behaviour of these bubbles as you go through increasingly complex configurations.


Tiling Town, by muratsubo Games
From the developer of Maxwell's Puzzling Demon comes a demo for their next game that really surprised me. This demo for Tiling Town is actually a standalone game called Tiling Forest, containing unique puzzles that won't be a part of the main game at all. What looks like a simple tile placement game - connecting roads between areas - becomes something far stranger when you realize you're consistently not given all the tiles you need. Most of the actual challenge here involves figuring out which of the many puzzles you've unlocked are actually solvable - like trying to do a dozen jigsaws at once but only one of them has all the pieces. Although I have some nitpicks (the controls aren't great, and I wish there was a hint system), this free demo is substantial enough to be a paid release on its own which would make some people's best-of-year lists. Uniquely compelling.


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Finally, one more piece of news before we sign off. It's been a minute or two since we've announced a new game but that's about to change. I'm thrilled to share that we'll soon be adding two new published titles to the Draknek & Friends family. Watch this space!

That's it!

Did you particularly enjoy any of the games above, or do you have a recommendation for a game I should check out? Please get in touch!

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