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.

LinkedIn, the professional network known for job listings and unsolicited career advice, is jumping into gaming. The platform is officially introducing a set of Wordle-style puzzle games, weeks after they were first spotted in the app.

The company is starting with three games: Pinpoint, a word game where players must guess the theme that ties a series of words together; Queens, a puzzle game that’s a bit like a cross between Sudoku and Minesweeper; and Crossclimb, a trivia game that involves guessing a series of four-letter words and placing them in the correct order.

LinkedIn describes them as “thinking-oriented games,” though the format will likely look familiar to fans of The New York Times Games app. Each game can only be played once a day, and players can share their score with friends in cute emoji-filled messages reminiscent of the “Wordle grid.” The service will also keep track of “streaks,” to encourage players to come back every day. Given the similarities, it shouldn’t be surprising that games were developed by LinkedIn’s news team, which recently hired a dedicated games editor.

Games have been a boon for The New York Times since it acquired Wordle in 2022, and other publications have tried to emulate that success with their own lineup of word and puzzle games. I asked LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief and VP of Product Dan Roth if the company was inspired by the success of Wordle and the NYT’s Games app. He said that the inspiration was actually much older: “the very first crossword puzzle” in the New York World newspaper more than 100 years ago. He added that there aren’t currently plans for a standalone gaming app.

“These games aren't designed to be just played,” Roth told Engadget. “We're not getting into the gaming world to get into the gaming world. The idea is games that can help you think differently and connect with your network.”

You can try out the new games on LinkedIn.

[Heath Paddock] wanted to confound his friends with a game that mimics an escape room in a box. About six months after starting, he had this glorious thing completed. It’s a hardware version of a game called Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes where players have five minutes to defuse a suitcase bomb. This implementation requires at least two players, one with the box-bomb itself, and one who holds all the knowledge but can’t see the box-bomb to defuse it.

[Heath]’s version has twice as many modules as the original game, each hand-wired one driven by an Arduino. One of the modules is an LED maze. There are two green anchor LEDs in one of six configurations, and and blue and a red LED.

The object is to move the blue LED next to the red one without touching any walls. Of course, the box-holder can’t see the walls and must describe the configuration of the anchor LEDs to their partner in order to get started.

All of the modules are quite different, which likely makes for an extremely fun and challenging five minutes. [Heath] reports that getting inter-module communication down was a long road. Eventually, [Heath] settled on a mesh network configuration and connected everything in a big loop. Be sure to check out the walk-through video after the break.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a hardware implementation of this game. Here’s one that uses a Raspberry Pi.

Maybe it’s just us, but isn’t it kind of amazing that in a world of pretty darn realistic games, PONG is still thrilling to play? This 1D implementation by [newsonator] is about as exciting as it gets.

It works like you’d probably expect — the light moves back and forth between the two players. Keep it in the green and you have a nice, gentle volley going. Let it hit your red LED and you’ve lost a point. But if you can push your button while your yellow LED is lit, the light speeds up tremendously until the next button press in the green.

Our only wish is that subsequent yellow-light button presses would make it speed up even more. But there are really just the two speeds with the current programming.

Inside the cool laser-cut box is an Arduino Uno and a 9V battery, plus a current-limiting resistor and the all-important buzzer. We like how [newsonator] wired up the LEDs to the Arduino by soldering them to a row of header pins and sticking that into the Arduino so it can be used in other projects down the line. We also like how [newsonator] shoved a couple of dowels through the box to ultimately support the two buttons.

Check out the intro video after the break for the overall details. The build is done over a few different short videos which follow.

Although this is pretty small, it isn’t quite the minimum viable.

Have you ever wanted to be the best Super Mario Brothers speedrunner, but you just couldn’t do the frame-perfect inputs? Fear not, because [Gregory Strike] is here to save the day with his automatic NES controller!

In his previous video, [Greg] already made an automatic controller that plays a sequence of inputs at the perfect time, but it still failed some of the frame-perfect tricks. So what gives? Deviation in the timing of the NES itself gives, as he shows how the NES doesn’t sample inputs at exactly the same time every frame. To account for this, he used the latch signal, which starts the controller reading process as a time reference, and replaced his digital “mixtape” with a more time-flexible Arduino. After the modification, he shows it pulling off frame-perfect inputs every time he plays Super Mario Brothers.

But if you have a controller that can do frame-perfect inputs and it can be connected to a computer, you can connect the controller to the internet! That’s right, [Greg] created a Twitch bot that tells the Arduino exactly what inputs to send, which then relays it to the NES. It accepts simple sequences of inputs via chat, and you can try it out right now on [Greg]’s Twitch stream.

This project shows promising results, and we think it’s possible to do much more with its internet connection. We’re certainly looking forward to what [Greg] decides to make next.

Video after the break.

The gaming world experienced a bit of a resurgence in 2020 that is still seen in the present day. Even putting aside the effects from the pandemic, the affordability and accessibility has arguably never been better. Building a gaming PC can have its downsides, though, and a challenging issue to troubleshoot is input lag or input latency. This is something that’s best measured with standalone hardware, and if this is an issue on your setup you may want to take a look at this latency meter.

Unlike other measurement devices that use the time between a mouse button input and the monitor’s display of a bullet or shooting event, this one looks at mouse movement and the change in the scene instead. This makes it much more versatile than other methods since it’s independent of specific actions, and can be used in any game without any specific events needed to perform the measurement. A camera is placed on the monitor’s top edge and the Arduino-based device sends mouse commands to the computer while measuring the time between those commands and the shift in the image on the monitor.

The project is open source, so with the right hardware it’s possible to build one to troubleshoot latency issues or just to learn more about a particular hardware configuration’s behavior. Arduinos and other microcontrollers have been doing all kinds of things by pretending to be human interface devices like this for a while now. One of our favorites of late was this effects pedal that replicates musical effects on mice and keyboards.

You might think that making your own electronic games would require some kind of LCD, but lately, [Mirko Pavleski] has been making his using inexpensive 8X8 WS2812B LED panels. This lets even a modest microcontroller easily control a 64-pixel “screen.” In this case, [Mirko] uses an Arduino Nano, 3 switches, and a buzzer along with some 3D printed components to make a good-looking game. You can see it in action in the video below.

The WS2812B panels are easy to use since the devices have a simple protocol where you only talk to the first LED. You send pulses to determine each LED’s color. The first LED changes color and then starts repeating what you send to the next LED, which, of course, does the same thing. When you pause a bit, the array decides you are done, and the next train of pulses will start back at the first LED.

It looks like the project is based on a German project from [Bernd Albrecht], but our German isn’t up to snuff, and machine translation always leaves something to be desired. Another developer added a play against the computer mode. This is a simple program and would be easy to port to the microcontroller of your choice. [Mirko]’s execution of it looks like it could be a commercial product. If you made one as a gift, we bet no one would guess you built it yourself.

Of course, you could play a real robot. You could probably repurpose this hardware for many different games, too.

What’s more fun than playing video games? Designing your own video game hardware, of course! If you’ve followed these pages long enough you’ll have seen dozens of great examples of homebrew hardware, and perhaps been inspired to try such a project yourself. This often starts with assembling the basic bits onto a solderless breadboard, which is fine for programming but not so great for testing: squeezing pushbuttons into your breadboard works for basic debugging, but is not very user-friendly or reliable. A better solution can be found in [Dimitar]’s GameBug: a set of breadboard-compatible joypad-like controllers.

The GameBug’s design excels in its simplicity: a miniature analog joystick, four buttons arranged in a diamond pattern, a shoulder button and two sliding switches are sitting on a neat purple PCB. On the bottom are two rows of pin headers to ensure a snug fit on your solderless breadboard. There’s even a little vibrating motor for haptic feedback.

Interfacing with the GameBug is simplified by the integrated readout electronics. A Schmitt trigger-based debounce circuit ensures clean signals from all the pushbuttons, while a motor driver chip provides stable current to the haptic feedback system. An RGB LED can be used as yet another user feedback device, or simply for decorative lighting.

All design files are available on [Dimitar]’s GitHub page, along with an Arduino sketch to help you try out the GameBug’s functionality. Having a proper gamepad might come in handy with breadboard-based game systems like Tiny Duck Hunt or this impressive mess of wires that makes up a Colecovision.

The classic arcade game Cyclone has attracted many players, along with their coins, thanks to its simple yet addictive gameplay. In its most basic form it consists of a light racing around a circular track, which the player then has to stop at exactly the right place. Arduino enthusiast [mircemk] made a home version of this game, which allows addicts to keep playing forever without running out of quarters.

Instead of an arcade cabinet, this smaller version has an upright 3D-printed ring that holds 60 WS2812 LEDs. A further six in the center of the ring act as a score counter. An Arduino in the base drives the LEDs and runs the game, which is based on an earlier iteration built by [oKeeg]. An interesting addition is a large homemade “arcade button”, which is large and sturdy enough to withstand any abuse inflicted on it by a frustrated player.

Retro-style sound effects and flashing light sequences give the game a bit of an arcade vibe, even without a big cabinet and piles of coins. Simple LED games like this are always great eye-catchers in any home or office; if you like this one, be sure to check out other LED games like the handheld LEDBOY, the one-dimensional dungeon crawler TWANG, and this LED racing game.

If you’ve ever played chess or even checkers, you’ve probably thought about making a board that lets a computer play you without having to enter your moves and look at the board on a screen. [Greg06] not only thought about it, but he built it.

The board looks great and uses foamboard which makes it easy to reproduce. Each piece has a small magnet within and an electromagnet on an XY motion system can selectively pick up and move pieces. In addition, a reed switch under each square can tell if a square is occupied or not.

This system is pretty simple, but it is effective. After all, you know the position of the pieces at the start. So if a bishop leaves a square and a new square gets a piece, you can assume it is the bishop. There is no need to actually distinguish the pieces.

An LCD and some buttons act as a chess clock, and note if a move is illegal. The Arduino has a pretty basic chess algorithm known as Micro Max that runs on the Arduino, but we wondered if you couldn’t connect to a remote computer to get more sophisticated gameplay or even interface to the Internet to play remote humans, something we’ve seen before. You could even adapt it for other input methods.