I often wish I had the mind for puzzle games. Alan “Draknek” Hazelden’s catalogue of deceptively hard brainteasers look bleedin’ lovely, but I simply can’t be screaming at my monitor with strangers in the office. After solving lunar train dilemmas with Cosmic Express and teaching us that A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build, Draknek And Friends are returning with A Monster’s Expedition – pushing over trees to explore a water-logged museum of human ruin on Steam and Itch.io later this year. (more…)

2017 has already been an extraordinary year for PC games, from both big-name AAA successes to no-name surprise indie smashes. Keeping up with so much that’s worth playing is a tough job, but we’ve got your back. Here is a collection of the games that have rocked the RPS Treehouse so far this year.

We’ve all picked our favourites, and present them here in alphabetical order so as not to start any fights. You’re bound to have a game you’d have wanted to see on the list, so please do add it to the comments below. … [visit site to read more]

This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Cosmic Express [official site].

There are many reasons why puzzle games designed by Alan Draknek Hazelden sit on top of the form. There s the puzzles, for one thing. They re pretty good. They explore seemingly simple rulesets and find in them huge and satisfying challenge, dragging you along for the ride. That s as true for Cosmic Express as for all Hazelden s games. (Actually, maybe that s sort of literally true, since Cosmic Express is about drawing tracks to take aliens on little train rides.)

But there s something else to his puzzles, something that opens up a sense of wonder at the depth of the little logical worlds that emerge from their rulesets and layouts. It s also something that gives you a sense of involvement and discovery in a genre that can so often feel like jumping through a designer s tortuous hoops. It s that they have:

THE MECHANIC: Multiple solutions … [visit site to read more]

While out at GDC I spent a bit of time chatting to Alan Hazelden about Cosmic Express [official site], his train-themed logic puzzler. I was playing the preview build of the game at the time and was curious to know a bit more about how you go about sorting the levels for a difficulty curve and how you interpret good and bad kinds of frustration when playtesting a puzzle game.

It was an interesting chat, punctuated by the arrival of a little dog partway through, so I’m going to just pull out a few of the observations which inform the difficulty curve discussion. It’s nice to have it as an accompaniment to yesterday’s the review. … [visit site to read more]

Here it is! The space game review you’ve all been waiting for on this, Monday the twentieth of March, 2017: Cosmic Express!

Cosmic Express [official site] is an adorable-but-also-rock-solid puzzle game from Alan Hazelden. He’s working with Ben Davis who was his collaborator on RPS favourite, A Good Snowman…, and with Tyu of the Klondike collective. The result is a really satisfying puzzle game where you lay the track for a train in order to transport little alien blobs to their destinations. … [visit site to read more]

The intergalactic planetary puzzling of Cosmic Express [official site] has pulled into the station. It’s a cute little puzzler about laying train tracks inside spacedomes to bring passengers to their destinations. It looks lovely and sounds simple but I’d expect fiendish puzzling as it’s made by folks from such fine head-scratchers as A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build and Sokobond. Have a gander at this trailer: … [visit site to read more]