Man, what a busy month May was. Well, maybe not for most, since we're all still cooped up evading deadly pathogens as best we can for a little while longer yet, but certainly for my playing and blogging habits. A whole dumb feature on old-ass RPGs will do that to you. So for this week's Indie Game of the Week, I plucked a little puzzle game from my backlog that projects a superb (if a little on the nose with all its "Relaxing Sounds Vol. 14" CD samples) atmosphere of serenity and calm. PuzLogic, from Eduardo Barreto, is what I tend to call a "pseudo-ku": a number placing game conceptually similar to Sudoku but for a tweaked ruleset that allows for more creative grids and number assortments than the usual 9 x 9. It rolls out new rules frequently, even right up towards the end of its 64 challenges, and each time gently eases you into this new mechanic before jumping back to wherever it was on an escalating difficulty curve.

So, confession time: I've actually been playing PuzLogic on and off since I received it in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality almost a year ago to the day. Not too often, granted, as I would've completed it long before now, but often enough that it served as an amuse-bouche between whatever I'd just been working on and whatever I intended to play next. Given the relatively simple mechanics - i.e. Sudoku rules - it's not a game that's going to leave you confused and lost if it's been a while, but towards the second half every puzzle had the potential to last thirty minutes or more as you left-brain your way towards the single correct solution. Since I noticed I was only a few puzzles away from completion the last time I booted it up, I've promoted PuzLogic to Indie Game of the Week status so I could talk about this year-long sojourn with it.

I'm sure you're all familiar with Sudoku so I won't go into too much detail on the goal, only that you have a selection of numbers - from 0 to 9, though not necessarily one of each - on the bottom area of the screen and the idea is to click and drag them to their correct spots in the level grid. Right-clicking a number allows you to instead drag and drop a small "reminder" tile for squares that might contain any number of possibilities; these smaller reminders are 1/4 the size, so you could feasibly fit four of them into a square while you figure out which one is correct. As you adjust to the standard Sudoku rules, you'll start to see puzzles with multiple colors, indicators that determine that a line needs a total of one color or the other (or a combination of both), misshapen grids that incorporate several disconnected squares that nonetheless cannot share numbers, total indicators for those grids (again, in either color-specific or color-agnostic flavors), and eventually equation arrows that indicate that the sum of the numbers on one side is equal to the sum of those on the opposing side. That all sounds like a lot, and obviously it's a lot clearer with visual aids, but as I said above the game's very accommodating about adding these new rules by giving you an easier "tutorial" of sorts for each before it incorporates them into the tougher puzzles.

As you can see from screenshots, the game has a very clean and perfunctory visual design that - if not aesthetically daring - does the usual necessary puzzle game thing of making everything as unambiguous as possible. Sound design-wise, you're getting some of those relaxing noises I talked about: birdsong, rain, distant thunderstorms, quietly roaring fireplaces; generally the type of stuff you get from sleep therapists or a yoga class. I don't find Sudoku to be all that rage-inducing even during those moments when I've realized I've ballsed everything up, but the game is determined to keep you from flying off the handle with its soporific mood-setting. I guess there must be a puzzle game design bible out there that has all these techniques listed in a special section with a lede like "listen, your puzzles are no doubt very clever but there's going to be a lot of dum-dums out there unsure how to solve them, so you need to hit them with the audio-visual equivalent of horse tranquilizers to keep them from freaking out and review-bombing your pride and joy."

Regardless, it never hurts to wind down a busy period with something relatively sedate, and PuzLogic meets the two criteria I always want to see from puzzle games: regular mechanical additions to keep the puzzles fresh, and a difficulty/learning curve that's neither too harsh nor too gentle for my silky smooth gray matter. Plus it was in a charity bundle created to assist a worthy cause, so it's just out there generating feel-good vibes all around.

Rating: 4 out of 5.