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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: Potion Pixel Released: December 4, 2025 Requirements: OS: Windows 10 Processor: Minimum, 2.0 dual core; Recommended, 2.5 dual core Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: Minimum, Integrated graphics (Intel HD 4000 or equivalent); Recommended, Nvidia GTX 750/AMD RX 460 or better DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 3 GB available space
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By flotsam Potion Pixel I stumbled across this recently and was glad I did. It’s a gentle puzzling bit of point and click, 2D side scrolling to find the next collection of puzzles. A cat will tell you how many there are in the current location, and successfully completing each puzzle will be heralded with a shower of confetti. Finish them all and colour returns to what was previously black and white. Which is the signal to move along. You start on a train, which pulls into the town of Gravebrook, a place “abandoned by time and swallowed by shadows.” Compelled to disembark, there’s an unsettling story involving the titular curse to be discovered as you explore. It reminded me of Birth in more ways than one, a game I reviewed not too long ago. Which is a positive in and of itself. Having left the train you move left or right, accessing shops and other venues which contain the various puzzles, eventually accessing additional streets, which contain more shops and more puzzles. Bits of the story unfold as you go. The puzzles are many (30 maybe?) and varied, none of them hard but some requiring another puzzle to be solved first and/or a clue to be identified. Many will be familiar, which doesn’t make them any less enjoyable. Only one puzzle verges on dudness, and it involves finding 100 little vials of potion in a 2D depiction of a house. Some vials are tiny, and whilst you can zoom in, it is still a meticulous treasure hunt when you have only a few left. The ability to click the magnifying glass and have it reveal a vial is a mixed blessing; it pulls you back out of whatever zoom you are in and shows about six rooms of the house, and briefly flashes a missing vial. I confess that the tiny flashing vials escaped my vision on numerous occasions, solving the puzzle ultimately coming down to scouring those identified six rooms. Well done to the maker for including a solution mechanism. Perhaps though a tweak (leave the targeted vial highlighted?) could further assist. Speaking of which (the maker that is), near as I could determine the game is largely a one-woman show, and it’s her very first game. Congrats to her. The game is played completely with the mouse, clicking and dragging required for many of the puzzles. There is no spoken word, but the various entities you will encounter will fill in the story with subtitles. A musical score accompanies your efforts. Each time you complete the puzzles in a location you will receive a piece of a note, which you will assemble as one of the last puzzles. The game saves automatically when you exit and just hit continue at the menu to pick up where you left off. It took me just over 2 hours. If you want brain busting, look elsewhere. If you want some cozy point and click puzzling, you might be as pleased as I was. I played on: OS: Windows 11, 64 Bit Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
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