this game makes my brain hurt

Cogs is, in essence, a collection of 50(ish) sliding puzzles. WAIT, COME BACK HERE! It's also surprisingly fun and relatively varied.

Sliding puzzles are considered tedious because the aim usually is to reconstruct a picture, or a sequence of numbers, meaning every piece has to be at its exact place, and that may cause frustration. But here, you have to align cogs and pipes, and some of the tiles are definitely inter-changeable (with few exception a cog is the same as another cog), so that problem is considerably lowered in most puzzles. Variety comes from the shapes of the boards, the types of cogs or pipes present, the kind of contraption ultimately activated by all those trinkets, double faced boards, bells to ring... Cogs is quite effective at keeping your interest alive. And it must be, because the puzzles are clearly challenging.

Another nice touch, is that each of the 50 puzzles also has two variants, much shorter and easier but with additional constraints (one must be completed in less than 30 seconds, the other in less than 10 moves).

There isn't a story, even though there definitely is a Steampunk meets Da Vinci's codex theme.

Music is forgettable, graphics are nice and clean, but unspectacular. Also, it's a bit disappointing when a 2009 game forces you into a 4:3 screen ratio.

Overall, the puzzle difficulty lied just within my fun zone and the game's uniqueness makes it hard to not recommend to puzzle enthusiasts.

By its nature, Cogs is a mobile game. And you can feel it when playing. Though, that doesn’t make it worse. Actually, its simplicity and easy to comprehend, yet challenging puzzles are great.

A reviewer commented how he hated timed puzzles. I completely agree. Doubly so when the "uber-smooth" animation removes a chunk of your time with each move. You might have 18 seconds to complete a puzzle, but when it takes 1 second for each block to slide into place before you can move the next one, you end up with 10.

With no option to turn off the animation, it ends up being kind of stupid how success or failure depends on how well you can time your mouse clicks. Not your puzzle solving abilites.

If you ever wanted a puzzle game with a Steampunk aesthetic, this is for you.