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I’m a big fan of the British comedy game show Taskmaster. Each season, five comedians compete against each other to complete ridiculous objectives. The competitors are often rewarded for lateral thinking, as long as they stick within each task's rules.

Every time I watch a player hilariously mess up, I often think “well, I could do better than that.” But sit me down in front of a puzzle game that demands adept use of logic or pushes me to think outside of the box, and l often get frustrated and give up quickly (unless I find a decent guide to help me out). That’s quite irritating, especially since we’re in a golden age of puzzle games.

After a busy day of work, I’m far more inclined to play something relatively mindless, like Overwatch 2 or Fortnite. I tend to bristle at anything that slows me down, such as turn-based games. But the more I push myself to stick with puzzle games, the more I appreciate them. There are three recently released options that I've been bouncing between recently in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Animal Well and Paper Trail.

I had enormous expectations for Lorelei. The last offering from developer Simogo, Sayonara Wild Hearts, is easily in my top three games of all time. Lorelei is completely different and it's not like anything I’ve experienced before.

It opens with a woman named Lorelei standing next to her car. The vehicle won't start, but fortunately there's a hotel close by. As it turns out, that's where Lorelei is supposed to be to help an artist complete his magnum opus. This is a place where time is nebulous. It's 1963, but there are computers where you save your progress and a Game Boy-style system to use. The hotel is the only real constant, and even that is built out of puzzles.

The visuals are astonishing, even on the Nintendo Switch. Shocks of Giallo-esque reds and pinks frequently punch through the monochromatic environments. The design language is unusual yet meticulously crafted to guide you from one puzzle to the next until Lorelei's photographic memory is overflowing with conundrums to conquer.

There are all kinds of riddles to solve here, and they all feel intertwined. At first, you’ll have a few simple math problems to figure out. From there, you’ll be dealing with everything from mazes to pattern matching and spatial awareness puzzles. You’ll need a decent grasp of Roman numerals and the ability to pull together disparate scraps of information. Unfortunately for my scatterbrained self, plenty of logical thinking is required.

I’m nowhere close to finishing Lorelei. Even so, I already appreciate the way that Simogo slotted the intricately layered puzzles together. My only quibble in the early going is the over-reliance on padlocks and three-digit codes that secure document tubes.

My brain is not well tuned for logic-heavy puzzles, so I need to be in the right mindset before sitting down with Lorelei for an hour or two. I want to savor this one at my own pace over the coming weeks and months. I'll forego guides and try to figure out another of Simogo’s strange, intoxicating worlds by myself.

While Lorelei gives the player an in-game manual in the opening moments, Animal Well offers barely any guidance at all. You (as a squishy little meatball thing) emerge from a flower into a cave with a large, ghostly squirrel on one side. It's not clear which direction to move in, what the objective is, what your character is or why you're there. All you can do is explore and try to figure it all out.

This has been described as a Metroidvania, a format that sees players backtracking to unlock a new area once they acquire a certain skill or upgrade. It’s taking most folks between four and six hours to finish the main game. But Animal Well is really more of a puzzle platformer. If you know what to do and how to do it, it’s possible to beat the game in a few minutes.

That’s part of Animal Well’s charm and beauty. Solo developer Billy Basso has weaved an intricate web of secrets, many of which are hidden in the shadows of its gorgeous pixel art (the game feels great too, thanks to smart use of haptic feedback on the PS5's DualSense controller). Without spoiling anything, I appreciate that the puzzles, many of which are traversal-based, are often open-ended. There are ways to progress even if you don't use an intended item or route.

I don't find the puzzles here nearly as taxing as those in Lorelei. The answers are all there, you just have to poke around and try things to see what happens.

The same could be said for Paper Trail from Newfangled Games. The painterly art style caught my eye when this started showing up at game showcases a couple of years back. The core mechanic is fascinating too.

The aim is to guide protagonist Paige through a swathe of mazy environments toward her goal of attending school and becoming an astrophysicist. But there are many obstacles in her way. Fortunately, Paige (and the player) can bend reality. This means folding over the edges of the world, which has two plains — just like a piece of paper — to open up new paths.

Newfangled finds clever ways of building on the central idea and the difficulty curve is fair but challenging. Paper Trail has a nice hint system that shows what folds to make, but not how to move Paige or any objects around.

Although the controls can be finicky, even while playing it on mobile (where it's available for Netflix subscribers), it's perhaps the puzzle game I've found the easiest to engage with lately. I enjoy contorting the world around Paige and lining up some patterns to unlock a path. It's the kind of game that makes me feel smart and satisfied whenever I figure out a solution.

I wager that the more I play these games and ones like them, the better I’ll get. We’ve had some downright great puzzle-centric titles over the last few years. Unpacking, Tunic and Cocoon immediately spring to mind. So does Teardown and its wildly fun destructive heists. Planet of Lana, Venba, Viewfinder, Humanity and Jusant were all among my favorite 2023 games in general.

I wish I'd been able to get into The Case of the Golden Idol, but I at least appreciate what it was going for. I might also finally get around to checking out Chants of Sennaar now that it's on Game Pass.

The puzzle games keep coming, as a Zelda-style adventure called Isles of Sea and Sky just popped up and grabbed my attention. And then there’s Indika, which sounds both deeply strange and remarkably mature.

In any case, as in all great puzzle games, there's a bigger picture. All of these are merely practice for the ultimate test, because a VR version of Taskmaster is coming in June. I'll soon get to find out whether I'm better at lateral thinking than comedians after all.

There’s no finer pleasure than starting the day with a slice of hot, fresh bread dripping in salted butter. Poets have waxed on about the joys of transforming so few ingredients into such a beautiful foodstuff for millennia. But unless life has been very good to you, it’s probably not often you wake up to freshly-made bread wafting from your kitchen. Are breadmakers the answer to this, the most first-world of first-world problems? And are they able to match or outdo the stuff I can make by hand?

French Bread by hand

It was only when we bought our home that I decided that making bread was a skill I had to learn lest I not feel like a Proper Adult. I scoured YouTube for a tutorial and stumbled across this clip by star baker Richard Bertinet. I’ve written before about how comforting and relaxing this video is, and it’s a balm for the soul when you’re having a rough day. Bertinet made this look so easy that anyone could achieve similarly beautiful results. Alas, I could not.

Mercifully, this was in the heyday of Twitter when celebrities were all around and happy to talk to fans. So, I asked Bertinet himself and got the necessary advice to remedy my woes — I wasn’t kneading the dough confidently, or for as long enough as I needed to make it work. After that, I was churning out some pretty gorgeous bread on a regular basis and my kids love eating my fougasse.

The recipe itself is so simple: 500 grams of strong bread flour, 10 grams of salt, 10 grams of yeast and 350 grams of water. That’s not an error: You stick a measuring jug on a weighing scale and weigh the water for a more accurate measurement. Once mixed, you have to get the dough onto the table and work it. The mix is sticky. Don’t add flour. Trust the process.

That means moving the dough, stretching it and folding air into it quickly and aggressively, really working it rather than just kneading it. If you let your hands hold on for too long, your fingers will sink into the mix and then it’s game over trying to get them out. Resist the urge to add more flour to reduce the wetness and instead just focus on keeping it moving until it finally forms. When it does, you’ll be staring at the most beautiful dough you will ever see.

Once you’ve left it to rise and subsequently knocked it down, you’ll be able to throw it into the oven. Toss in some water to add some steam and you’ll get a beautifully crusty, tasty loaf

Breadmakers

There are benefits to breadmakers, including the fact you can have fresh bread made at home and that you can set when the process begins. Toss your ingredients in before you go to bed, set a delay and you’ll wake up with the smell of bread wafting through your home. I’ve been setting my tests to finish at 7am, so by the time we’ve all been dragged by our noses downstairs, it’s ready to go.

Unfortunately, in my experience that’s where the upsides to breadmakers stop and the downsides begin. You will never get the same quality of bread from a machine that you will get mixing the dough by hand.

The machines have small paddles that wheel around at the base of the mixing bowl. That action can’t mix hard enough to stretch the protein in the flour that promotes the formation of gluten. And it can’t add the same volume of air into the mix to help create a good rise and a fluffy texture inside. Normal bread recipes don’t work as well since you’ll need to add extras into the mix to improve the flavor (more on this later) and malleability, like milk, sugar and vegetable oil.

That little paddle will then lodge itself in the base of your loaf while it bakes, so you’ll need to fish it out every morning. The void in the middle of your bread that’s left behind is big enough to ensure that you won’t be able to slice too much of the loaf for toast or sandwiches.

The second big downside, and the one that’s more heartbreaking, is the smell that wafts upstairs each morning isn’t that great. Even on the lightest setting the bread comes out overdone compared to the real thing. No matter what recipe I tried, the smells are overwhelmingly yeasty and sour, which makes me less enthused about the morning feast. What emerges has the physical and mechanical properties of bread but very little actual flavor. Slather it in cold, salted butter all you want but, fundamentally, it just doesn’t hit as good as the most mediocre of store-bought breads.

That’s just my opinion, of course, and some folks have justifiable reasons for opting for “mid” bread over no homemade bread at all. But if you must buy a machine to do your breadmaking for you, here are two of the better options on the market.

Gastroback Design Automatic Bread Maker Pro

Photo by Daniel Cooper / Engadget

Much as I’m down on breadmakers, there are reasons why I’m quite fond of the Gastroback Automatic Bread Maker Pro. I’m a sucker for an easy user interface and a viewing window, the latter of which will let you keep an eye on how your mix is coming along. Admittedly, no bread maker has an “easy” UI, but this one is tolerable, with each function set with its own dedicated button. The only annoyance is cycling through the program button, and since there are 19 options, you’d better make sure you’re doing it right.

After that, you just have to set the three color options (light, medium or dark) and the weight of the dough you’re creating (500g, 750g or 1,000g). It’ll tell you how long it’ll take for your loaf to be baked, and you can add on a delay for however long you need. As for options, the Gastroback will make various breads, mix doughs together for you and will even defrost meals in its pan. I wasn’t brave enough to try the stir fry settings, mind you, where you’re promised to mix and bake dry ingredients like peanuts and soybeans.

But the bread it produces is what I’ll describe as “generic breadmaker bread,” which is to say it’s warm and it’s there. No matter what recipes I tried, the results were never that great.

T-Fal Pain & Delices Bread Maker

Photo by Daniel Cooper / Engadget

T-Fal looked to set its bread maker apart from its competitors by giving it the ability to do plenty more jobs in your home. You’ll get all the standard stuff like making breads, cakes and mixing doughs for bread, pizza and pasta. But, in the style of all shopping channel adverts, you’ll also be able to use this to make porridge, cook cereals and prepare homemade jelly. Oh, and if you’ve got pasteurized cow’s milk you can use a bundled accessory to churn yogurt and soft cheese.

The user interface is pretty much the same as the Gastroback, albeit with some chunkier, better looking buttons. But where it falls down is in the lack of a viewing window, which means you’ll only be able to see how your loaf has developed by lifting the lid. Which, I should add, you can’t do while the bread is baking, so you’ll never know if a problem is developing until it’s done. And the bread it produces is just lackluster, to the point where my kids — who signed up as willing testers at the start of this process — quickly lost interest. Fundamentally, I’m not sure the Tefal is compelling enough to warrant you buying it unless you’re really tolerant of weak bread.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that AI-generated emojis may be one of the new features Apple shows off at WWDC next month. If the current emoji library weren’t overwhelming enough (let alone my increasingly growing sticker collection both on Messages and WhatsApp), Gurman writes that the company “is developing software that can create custom emojis on the fly, based on what users are texting.” Niche food emojis? Yes, please. :tunamayosandwich:

– Mat Smith

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Kobo Clara Colour ereader review

Color pages steal the show.

Engadget

The Clara Colour is a $150 ereader that taps into Kobo’s own book library (and local libraries), but augments the experience with color book covers. Yes, Kobo beat Kindle to the punch in getting a color ereader out the door. While Amazon is busy experimenting with everything else, ereader-wise, it’s safe to assume that a color Kindle will land at some point. For now, though, Kobo’s Clara Colour is the consumer-friendly color ereader to beat.

Of course, I love that Kobo spelled color with a ‘u’, but I’m not sure I can explain why.

Continue reading.

Somehow, Resident Evil 6 sold over a million copies on Switch

A true horror mystery.

Resident Evil 6 has sold surprisingly well on the Nintendo Switch since it was ported to the console in 2019, despite it being almost universally panned by fans. The game was just added to Capcom’s Platinum Titles list, meaning it’s crossed the threshold of one million units sold. Don’t do it to yourself, please. May I suggest the remade RE2 (or 3), or one of the myriad Resident Evil 4 remakes. Or if you feel like having a heart attack, any of the Resident Evil games made for VR.

Continue reading.

Someone made a Flappy Bird tribute for the Playdate

Crank to flap.

Playdate

A Flappy Bird tribute for the Playdate is now available to play, if you’re up for sideloading something onto your cute little crank console. Surprise: using the crank to control the bird makes it even harder.

Continue reading.

Memorial Day is here, and along with the holiday has come a swath of tech deals available across the internet. In addition to the typical outdoor gear we see go on sale during this time, a number of our favorite earbuds, tablets, streaming devices and other gadgets are discounted at the moment. Most of the deals we’ve curated below represented record-low prices, or the best prices we’ve seen so far all year. You’ll likely have to wait until Black Friday (or Amazon Prime Day in July) to see even steeper discounts, but nevertheless, these sales are worth considering if you have tech on your shopping list. Here are the best Memorial Day sales on tech and gadgets that you can get for 2024.

Our top picks

• New and noteworthy Memorial Day deals

• Best Apple Memorial Day sales

• Best outdoor Memorial Day sales

• Best vacuum Memorial Day sales

• Best Memorial Day sales on Anker charging gear

• Best Memorial Day sales on streaming services and devices

• Best Memorial Day sales on headphones and earbuds

• Best Memorial Day sales on tech gear

New and noteworthy Memorial Day deals

Best Apple Memorial Day sales

Best outdoor Memorial Day sales

Best vacuum Memorial Day sales

Best Memorial Day sales on Anker charging gear

Best Memorial Day sales on streaming services and devices

Best Memorial Day sales on headphones and earbuds

Best Memorial Day sales on tech gear

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

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Over the past few years, I’ve developed a peaceful little routine to make up for time spent cooped up inside working on sunny days: after I’ve closed my laptop for the day, I throw my sneakers on, open Pikmin Bloom on my phone, and go for a long walk to clear my head and plant virtual flowers with the 'min.

Pikmin Bloom was released for Android and iOS in 2021 by Pokémon Go developer Niantic and Nintendo as another “go outside and touch grass” app, and I’ve been playing it pretty regularly since then. Only recently, when the app announced some special events for its 2.5-year anniversary, did it occur to me how long I’ve actually stuck with it. There isn’t all that much to Pikmin Bloom, but that’s part of the charm — it’s more of a walking buddy than a full-on game. You accumulate Pikmin, feed them nectar so they’ll grow flowers from their heads, then pick the petals and use those to “plant flowers” when you go on walks (don’t think too hard about the science of that, it’s Pikmin).

Unlike Pokémon Go, Pikmin Bloom doesn’t require a lot of your attention while you’re walking around, which really appealed to me as someone who likes to stay fully aware of their surroundings while out and about. That, and the promise of being accompanied wherever I go by a horde of quietly singing Pikmin; I just love those weird little guys.

I typically get everything set up before I leave for a walk, making sure I have plenty of petals ready to plant. Then I hit the ‘Start’ button and mostly leave the app alone until I take a break or am done with my walk, checking in only here and there to see if I’ve passed anything of interest. You can send your Pikmin on expeditions to pick up fruit or destroy mushrooms that’ll pop up on your map, but you don’t need to be actively walking to do this, as they’ll be recorded on a list you can revisit later. Once I’m back home, I love seeing how many flowers I planted versus how many steps I took (I still haven’t figured out the ratio), and delegating different missions for my Pikmin to tackle.

There are frequent events that serve as motivation for reaching certain step count goals or planting a particular number of flowers, including some with community involvement. And, there's the prospect of collecting themed Pikmin who wear special decor outfits. Pikmin Bloom is currently teasing some upcoming Cheese Decor Pikmin for next month, and I’m going to work extra hard to try and get them. While the app does have the potential to lure players into in-app purchases, they’re by no means necessary to get the full experience. I’ve managed to make it this far without spending any money at all.

Pikmin Bloom has an AR component similar to Pokémon Go’s, so you can photograph your Pikmin in the real world, but this feature can be pretty glitchy. What’s better than that, in my opinion, are the postcards your Pikmin will sometimes bring back from their travels — they’ve been known to photobomb landmarks in these pictures on occasion. If you have friends in the app, you can send postcards to them too. Pikmin Bloom also has a built-in lifelog, where you can choose a picture from your walk and jot down any notes and feelings from your day. It’s a nice thing to look back on once you’ve racked up a lot of adventures.

I’ve tried out plenty of apps over the years that attempt to gamify physical activity, but I almost always lose interest in them pretty quickly. For all its simplicity, Pikmin Bloom adds just the right amount of reward to a walk without distracting from the actual activity. Plus, there are Pikmin.

It’s officially ice cream season, and if you’ve been wanting to try your hand at making the dessert yourself, Walmart has a deal you might be interested in. The Ninja Creami ice cream maker is $50 off right now, bringing the price down to $149 — the best price we’ve seen for it all year. The Creami is designed for ease of use and gives you control over the texture of the finished product, so you can make ice cream, sorbet, milkshakes and other kinds of frozen treats.

The deal applies to the Ninja Creami model with 5 one-touch progams: Ice Cream, Sorbet, Milkshake, Lite Ice Cream and Mix-in (which lets you toss in embellishments like chocolate chips or nuts). It also comes with two 16oz pints to make and store your ice cream in. The Creami is one of our favorite kitchen gadgets and earned a review score of 90, requiring minimal work on your part to make ice cream with the ingredients of your choice. All you need to do is prep the mixture that will be your base, toss it in the freezer overnight, then pop it in the Creami for processing.

The Ninja Creami won’t take up too much counter space, and most of the parts can go in the dishwasher for an easy cleanup after using it. It operates a bit like a food processor, but uses what the company refers to as a Creamerizer Paddle that has two different types of blades to get a uniform texture. There’s one for shaving the frozen base and another for smoothing it all out. It also has dual drive motors that allow for both a spinning motion and downward pressure to make for a good churn.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

iOS 18 may inject a little more fun into the iPhone experience. In the Power On newsletter this week, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that AI-generated emoji will be among the new features Apple shows off at WWDC next month. As if the current emoji library weren’t overwhelming enough, Gurman writes that the company “is developing software that can create custom emojis on the fly, based on what users are texting.” I, for one, cannot wait to see the cursed creations that are sure to come out of that one.

Apple is also reportedly making it so iPhone users will have more customization options for their apps and home screen, like the ability to change the color of app icons and arrange things more freely, rather than being locked into the grid layout. The latter especially would be a pretty big change for Apple, but surely a welcome one for any users who have been itching to get more creative with their home screen designs. Of course, these are still rumors, so don’t take any of it as set in stone.

There’s been a ton of talk about Apple’s AI plans in the leadup to its annual developers conference, which kicks off on June 10, but rather than debut anything too flashy at this stage, Gurman suggests Apple will stick to practical applications for the technology. Apple is expected to announce a partnership with OpenAI and, according to Gurman, may give an AI boost to things like Safari searches, Siri, photo retouching and voice memo transcriptions. The company may also introduce smart recaps for notifications, web pages and more.

Ah, Flappy Bird. It’s been a long time since I last gave any thought to the game-turned-cultural-phenomenon that briefly had us all in a chokehold a decade ago. At least, that was the case until this morning, when I stumbled upon a Reddit post announcing a Flappy Bird tribute for the Playdate and, without a moment’s hesitation, sideloaded it onto my device. Now here I am, absolutely hooked on this maddening little game once again. And, using the crank to control that silly little bird, it's even harder this time around. FlappyBird by Chibisuke is free and available to download for Playdate on itch.io. You’re welcome... or, I’m sorry.

FlappyBird is just like the OG game, but in grayscale. You can play using the up button on the D-pad, the ‘A’ button or the crank to guide the bird between the pipes, but I’ve been going with the latter for the extra challenge it adds. It also just feels like a perfect use of the crank, and I like making the most of the Playdate’s funky design whenever I can. There are other games inspired by Flappy Bird that you can get for the Playdate, like Cranky Bird and Flappybalt, but Chibisuke’s FlappyBird is a direct clone of Dong Nguyen’s infamous side-scroller. 

It’s definitely one way to get your heart rate up on a Sunday afternoon. Just, please do not ask me about my high score, I… don’t want to talk about it.

Elon Musk told investors this month that his startup xAI is planning to build a supercomputer by the fall of 2025 that would power a future, smarter iteration of its Grok chatbot, The Information reports. This supercomputer, which Musk reportedly referred to as a “gigafactory of compute,” would rely on tens of thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs and cost billions of dollars to build. Musk has previously said the third version of Grok will require at least 100,000 of the chips — a fivefold increase over the 20,000 GPUs said to be in use for training Grok 2.0.

According to The Information, Musk also told investors in the presentation that the planned GPU cluster would be at least four times the size of anything used today by xAI competitors. Grok is currently in version 1.5, which was released in April, and is now touted to process visual information like photographs and diagrams as well as text. X earlier this month started rolling out AI-generated news summaries powered by Grok for premium users.