Get Puzzled is a small independent studio making puzzle games for adults. Six games, six mechanics, one standard of craft.
Puzzle games are among the oldest things people do with a computer, and they have been comprehensively hollowed out. The genre now mostly consists of one set of mechanics wrapped in whatever theme is testing well, monetised by interrupting you at the moment you are most invested. The puzzle is still in there. It is just no longer the product.
We started from the opposite end. Pick six genuinely different puzzles — spatial, logical, creative, observational, sequential, geometric — and build each one properly, as its own game, with its own rules and its own hard problems. Then get out of the way.
Mostly it means verification. A nonogram is checked by a solver that is only allowed to use logic, and thrown away if that solver has to guess. A sliding puzzle is shuffled from the solved state, because half of all random tile arrangements cannot be solved at all. A tangram figure is checked to decompose exactly, and every valid arrangement is accepted rather than only the one we had in mind. A spot-the-difference pair is checked against the authored list of what changed, so a compression artefact never masquerades as a difference.
None of this is visible in a screenshot. All of it is the difference between a puzzle you can trust and one you cannot, and trusting the puzzle is the entire experience. When you are stuck on something verified, being stuck is interesting. When you are stuck on something unverified, you are just being wasted.
These are constraints rather than features, and some of them cost real money. They are on this page so that you can hold us to them.
The art is commissioned and curated rather than generated, and each piece carries its provenance. The typography, spacing, and colour are shared across the apps and this site, which is why they read as one publisher.
Accessibility is treated as correctness, not as a feature with a backlog ticket. Text scales with your system settings. Controls are sized to be hit reliably. Colour is never the only thing distinguishing one state from another, and contrast is measured rather than eyeballed. The apps are tested with screen readers. If something does not work with your assistive technology, it is a defect and we will fix it — please tell us.
Get Puzzled is the publishing name for the puzzle apps built and operated by Beacon Light Investments, based in Hillsborough County, Florida, United States.
It is a small operation. The person who writes the code reads the support mail, which is the main reason bug reports get answered properly and the main reason we would rather hear from you than read about it in a review.
Working on something with us? Artists, translators, and accessibility testers are the three kinds of help we most often need. Write to kyled@beaconlightinvestments.com and say which one you are.