Delete is a minesweeper-inspired puzzle game released in 2018 on Steam (Windows, mac). It is available for €1.99, and is sometimes put on sale at €1.39 (-30%) according to SteamDB.

It took me off guard by its original ideas and its clever execution: the game teaches you everything you need to know as you progress into the levels. And for the average two and a half hours this game lasts (according to HowLongToBeat; I completed it in about 2h15), I was hooked.

The music provides a particularly chill vibe, but I turned it off only to keep the sound effects, which I found especially satisfying.

Linux compatibility

Although the game is not natively available for Linux, I played it using Proton 8.0-2 and encountered absolutely no issues (see my ProtonDB report). The game ran smoothly and did not crash.

Twists and turns

Delete has a lot of inventive ideas and makes good use of them, yet I felt some of them could’ve been used in a few additional levels.
But I haven’t even told you what these “twists” were yet!

Picture yourself a minesweeper game. Now make it 3D! That’s the main twist of the game.

Now that we’ve got some 3D, what could come with it? You guessed it (or maybe not!): translations and rotations!

The last levels make a particularly good use of the moving parts of the “game board”. You need to be astute as to how and when you uncover cases or flag them for hiding a bomb underneath!

I won’t go into more details here, as I think it would ruin some of the fun of discovering the game.
If you like puzzle games, if you love(d) playing Minesweeper on Windows, then definitely go check it out. It’s a breath of fresh air, it’s fun, and it’s great on a budget, even if it’s a tad short!

Lines Infinite, released in 2017 on Steam (Linux, Windows and mac), is a puzzle game available at a ridiculously low price (€0.99, and often discounted at €0.29 according to steamdb).

It comes with a hundred numberlink puzzles, which are logic puzzles involving connecting numbers on a grid (see Wikipedia), and a quickly-annoying music and sound effects, which I ended up muting after 20 minutes of play time.

The UI is good, because there’s no useless stuff: you boot the game, and you can immediately start playing it - there’s no main menu, no “save” to load. You pick the level you want to play, and there you go. But that’s about it, as you’ll quickly be frustrated by the inability to “redraw” or “continue” a line without having to erase it.

Moreover, this game is plagued by its (non-existent) difficulty curve: early-game levels felt somehow harder than mid-game ones, whereas you sometimes encounter extremely easy levels seemingly out of nowhere. Balancing the difficulty in puzzle games is known to be a tricky matter, but said absence of a difficulty curve annihilates all sense of progress you might get, aside from the Steam achievements.

Finally, a tutorial could help onboard players that do not know how numberlink puzzles work. I don’t say it’s necessary, but it might have helped improve my opinion about this game.

To put things in a nutshell: Lines Infinite remains a decent puzzle game, thanks to its price and the average 3 hours of playtime you can expect from it (according to HowLongToBeat).