r/puzzlevideogames

Every Sudoku app I tried had ads, popups, or some streak thing nagging me to come back. So I made my own.

It's called Calm Sudoku. Free daily puzzle plus 30 to start, and if you like it there's a one-time unlock for the full set (300 puzzles, three difficulties). No subscription, no ads, no accounts, works offline.

All the normal stuff (notes, undo, check, reveal, history) is free. I'm not paywalling how you play, just how many puzzles you get.

Made it mostly for myself, but figured some of you might want the same thing. Would love to hear what you think! 🙂

Calm Sudoku on the iOS App Store

I made Starglyphs because I loved the Astrariums in Dragon Age: Inquisition and wanted a whole game full of those puzzles!

Each constellation has a glyph to trace. You need to find a route that uses every connection exactly once. When you finish it, the constellation becomes a nebula.

Starglyphs is coming to Steam later this month. Check it out and feel free to let me know what you think!

You can try the browser trial here:
https://starglyphs.com

Steam wishlist:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4879810/Starglyphs/

Game title: The Last Evidence

Playable link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fngames.thelastevidence

Platform: Android

Rune Log is a quiet and slightly occult detective word game. Villagers bring you petitions in the shape of runic scripture. You decode it cryptogram-style, with anchor words, letter patterns, repeated glyphs and context clues.

But the decoded line rarely answers the question directly. You type your own conclusion in plain English, and the game judges it. Paraphrases work and wrong answers get caught. Sometimes the truth is a gut-punch and sometimes it's a little funny.

It has a five act story mode where your reputation shifts with how well you read the Rune Logs, an endless mode with procedurally generated cases and a mode where you can generate your own rune puzzles and export them.

It's a solo project and my first release. It'll be out this August on Steam. Wishlist helps a lot!

RUNE LOG

I’d be happy if you could try the demo and wishlist the game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4782720/Nothing_Can_Go_Wrong/

Just shipped my first mobile game (Brain Twist — 75 lateral-thinking puzzles,

offline, Android), and since this sub is about actually building with AI,

here's my honest experience using Claude through the whole thing.

Stack:

- Flutter (Android, fully offline — puzzle data bundled locally)

- AdMob for monetization

- Claude (claude.ai) as my main dev partner throughout

How I actually used Claude:

I'm not a Flutter expert, so Claude carried a lot of the early weight —

scaffolding the project, helping me structure the puzzle data, and getting me

unstuck when I hit errors I didn't understand. The pattern that worked best

was treating it like a pair-programmer I could paste an error into, rather

than asking it to write whole features blind.

The honest surprise — the AI-assisted *coding* was the easy part. What ate my

time was everything around it that no amount of code generation solves:

- AdMob review kept flagging my app, and the actual cause was a missing

developer website on the store listing — took a while to trace

- Setting up app-ads.txt (ended up hosting it via GitHub Pages)

- The general Play Store publishing gauntlet — listing requirements, review

waits, all the unglamorous launch admin

If I'd known going in that "make the game" and "get the game live" were two

completely different difficulty levels, I'd have budgeted my time differently.

For others here building with AI: where do you find the assistant stops being

useful? For me it was hard at the boundary between "writing code" and "dealing

with platform/store bureaucracy" — Claude was great at the first, couldn't

touch the second.

Screenshots here are real captures from the game. Play Store link if you want

to see it:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.balumahendra592.braintwist

I've spent the last few months building something and I'm finally at the point where I want to share it properly rather than just quietly hoping people find it.

The idea came from a frustration I kept seeing (and feeling myself): SQL tutorials teach the syntax fine but there's never a reason to care about the answer. You filter a table called employees, get a result, and nothing happens. Your brain doesn't bother keeping it.

I wanted to try a different approach. QueryCase teaches SQL through detective investigations. You get a briefing from Chief Fox (our mascot), a real database to query, and a mystery to crack. The JOIN matters when a suspect has an alibi. The WHERE clause matters when you're trying to find who entered the building at 22:13. The SQL is the tool for solving something, not the point in itself.

Here's what's actually in it:

• A structured learning path across 54 cases, going from Recruit through Rookie, Detective, Senior Detective, and Chief Detective. Each rank has drills and a level exam to pass before you progress.
• Sandbox mode where you can explore real datasets (IMDB movies, Spotify, sports stats, Steam games) and run whatever you want with no pressure and no mystery attached. Just free exploration against actual data.
• Everything runs in the browser using DuckDB WASM so there's nothing to install.

I'm a solo developer and this is genuinely early days. I'm sharing here because this community is exactly the kind of people I built it for, and I'd rather get honest feedback now than find out later I've built the wrong thing.

What's missing? What would make you actually stick with something like this versus what you've used before?

querycase.com if you want to take a look.

Any feedback appreciated!

I cannot fathom what this sub likes about this game. Is calling this game a puzzle game some kind of inside joke this community has? Combo that with tell people to go in blind so that they actually fall for it? I'm like 5 hours in and I haven't encountered literally anything that would make me think this is anything else other than an exploration game. I certainly haven't encountered anything that resembles a puzzle or even a clue. The closes thing to a puzzle I've found is a door that required you to move a ball along a totally straight track to open it (okay fine, it the track had one right angle). The game doesn't even seem to have an objective. The only objective I see is 'make sense of all the lore and figure out the story the game is trying to tell you about some dead aliens'. If that's the case, I have found several clues in the form of old alien writing, but nothing interconnected enough that I could even start to mull things over in my head; it all seems like pointless fluff. And that's the real kicker. A puzzle game should provide you things to think about, and the outer wilds just hasn't. Combine that with some ridiculously challenging controls that make the exploration frustrating rather than exciting, and I'm left wondering if I'm playing the same game as everyone else. What am I missing here?

Edit: Checked steam and fixed time played to be more accurate. It certainly felt like a lot longer, probably because of how much of a slog I'm finding this game.

Edit2: thanks everyone. I’ve had so much trouble flying the ship that I’ve just been trying to land in the easiest spots, and on the rare occasions I manage to do so without blowing up I was just exploring whatever was nearby. The advice about really following the ship log helps, but it’s not particularly useful if I can’t land anywhere near where I need to be. I’ll give it another shot and see if my mind changes

Game Title: 84 Edges

Platform: iOS (iPhone/iPad)

Playable Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/84-edges/id6741699107

Description: 84 Edges is a combinatorics-style logic puzzle I built solo, which now lives on the App Store as of today — manipulating edges and tiles to satisfy interacting constraints across 200+ levels. It's the kind of puzzle where you need corroborating information on the puzzle to solve it. 

I truly believe that this puzzle could provide hours of challenging fun game experience to those whom enjoy this genre of puzzles, but I'm not sure yet if I've nailed it or just built something that feels satisfying because I designed it. That's what I'm hoping this community can help me figure out:

 - Does the difficulty curve feel earned or spiky?

 - Do the mechanics have real depth or get repetitive? 

 - What felt unfair vs. a genuine "aha"?

Looking for a few sharp, critical eyes.  I’m confident that everyone can solve level 1 but I’m also confident that only the most determined puzzle solvers can crack past level 100

Are you up for the challenge.  I would dearly appreciate any feedback from this community.

Kind Regards

Free to Play Status:
Free to play

Involvement: Solo developer — I designed, built, and shipped the entire game myself (mechanics, levels, art, and code).