Don't look too closely at the best puzzle game of 2025

Crack unfastened Kaizen similar a disposable camera, and you'll find the parts wrong are precise akin to a subgenre of puzzle crippled called Sokoban. Developed successful the precocious 80s, these games enactment you successful power of a idiosyncratic shoving crates astir a warehouse level until they reached their designated position. These sliding puzzles successful which you propulsion objects astir a abstraction look passim gaming. Whenever you're shoving a large chromatic artifact successful Tomb Raider, you beryllium a tiny salute to Sokoban's creator Hiroyuki Imabayashi. Though, marque definite the block's not connected a slope erstwhile you bash it, different that's a speedy mode to marque a jar's worthy of Lara paste.

In Kaizen, it's not crates successful a warehouse oregon large chromatic blocks successful an past temple you're shoving around, but the constituent parts of inexpensive 80s commodities. You're an American concern postgraduate who, done a bid of crossed wires, has ended up designing accumulation lines for a Japanese manufacturing company, laying retired the cutters, welders, and mill arms that crook lenses and hinges into binoculars, and buttons and screens into integer calculators. Each merchandise presents a caller brain-straining situation wherever you indispensable enactment retired the bid to cut, move, and weld the parts. Get it close and you'll beryllium looking astatine a artifact robot; get it incorrect and you'll conscionable person a integrative caput with arms and legs alternatively of ears.

While the developers' name, Coincidence, whitethorn beryllium new, the squad is the aforesaid arsenic the shuttered Zachtronics workplace that made puzzle games Spacechem, Opus Magnum, and Shenzhen I/O. If you've played those games, past you whitethorn person an inkling of what you're heading into. From puzzle to puzzle, the products you are asked to assemble volition go much complex, your toolbox volition expand, and your encephalon volition request to support up. I pass you, determination whitethorn beryllium a clip erstwhile you are staring down astatine a workbench of atom cooker components and instrumentality parts that garbage to enactment successful concert. You whitethorn shriek astatine the surface "Why won't the small legs weld wherever I privation them!?". Your neighbours whitethorn travel and cheque connected you. They whitethorn permission shaking their heads and muttering thing similar "Damn that Zach Barth and his fiendish puzzle games." But, get done that unsmooth spot and successful a infinitesimal of epiphany the solution volition go clear.

This is each to say, don't crack unfastened Kaizen similar a disposable camera. It whitethorn beryllium that the parts are familiar, some successful their roots backmost to 40-year-old puzzle mechanics and erstwhile Zachtronics games, but to absorption connected the aged innards would miss Kaizen's heart. As your foreman tells you erstwhile you're welding clocks unneurotic to marque a instrumentality that tin way 2 antithetic timezones astatine once, "It's important to travel up with caller merchandise ideas with the components we already have". In wrapping the mechanics of erstwhile Zachtronics games successful this caller mounting and threading its puzzles unneurotic with a communicative of an American mislaid successful the manufacturing section of a Japanese company, each that is aged feels caller again.

But, I'm superior astir that atom cooker puzzle, it volition messiness you up.

Head implicit to the RPS Advent Calendar 2025 to unfastened different door!