Corrypt 4+

Corrypt starts off as a fun little puzzler--like Sokoban but you drag the blocks as well as push them--and turns into an open world puzzle game where you feel like you have total freedom... to solve the puzzles or wreck everything by accident. This sense of dizzying agency is something I've never experienced in a puzzle game. Usually I'm trying to suss out the "intended solution"--but here the level of power/accidental destruction introduced by the glitched tiles that transport items from screen to screen is almost scary and it feels like there's a lot of room for emergent gameplay choices. I played Imbroglio and 868-Hack and liked them well enough, but Corrypt immediately shot to the top of my all-time favorite game experiences.

I was initially turned off by the style of the graphics but please give it a shot. If you liked The Witness, Braid, and other game-changing puzzler experiences, you will love this.

Because you've tried a million times to solve one of the puzzles. And then you put it down and pick it up again later and you finally figure it out. This cycle repeats itself over and over making this game infuriatingly difficult and incredibly gratifying.

Corrypt is a brilliant game. It is small scale, you can finish it in a day, but it is densely packed with ideas and challenges and mind-altering epiphanies.

Corrypt starts out as a simple puzzle game, a set of Sokoban logic
mazes wrapped in a light Zelda-esque adventure theme. But as this game unfolds, it playfully twists this structure in a way that must be played to be understood. Suffice to say, you can place Corrypt alongside Portal and Braid as a game which achieves great effects by experimenting with the fundamentals of its structure.

Corrypt is difficult in both senses of the word. It's difficult like a Rubik's Cube and it's difficult like noise music, avant garde cinema, or modernist literature. It is unconventional and uncompromising, but it is also personal and warm, the carefully crafted work of a single individual, and I found it strangely haunting.

Buy it. Play it. When you get stuck, put it away. Let it sit in your pocket, and in your head. Come back to it later and play some more. Eventually it will reveal its secrets to you, I promise. This small game, with its rough edges and its cryptic, self-consuming topography, is beautiful and important, and will repay the attention you give it a thousandfold.