Steam’s Puzzle Showcase has big discounts for Portal, Outer Wilds, Obra Dinn, and more

What to buy in Steam's puzzle sale?

The Cerebral Puzzle Showcase is back again on Steam, offering heavy discounts for over 200 puzzlers and over 40 demos for upcoming headscratchers. That’s quite a lot of puzzle games, so let’s stretch those dusty noggins with some good old recommendations.

“It's like La La Land if La La Land was three interlocking Rubik's cubes,” wrote Edwin Evans-Thrilwell in his Kine review. You’ll be rolling three musicians, who happen to be boxes, across levels that don’t quite fit their various horns, tubes, and other appendages. But flipping and twisting them in clever ways is where the fun’s at. As you’d expect from a game about an aspiring band, though, the jazz soundtrack is also awesome and perfect for a brainy night in.

Return Of The Obra Dinn makes you put on a detective hat for some murder mystery shenanigans. Despite being set on a mysterious merchant ship, the investigation here has almost nothing in common with an Agatha Christie-type puzzle box. You instead need to piece together clues and relive the tragic final moments of all 60 passengers, which is very grim - but I guarantee it’ll tease your brain.

The Portal duology needs no introduction. Portal 2 is our favourite game of all time for crying out loud. But here’s another reminder to play the brilliant physics puzzlers, mainly because getting bullied by a passive-aggressive robot will make you a tougher, stronger person for the affordable price of a single pound/dollar. And partly because her little hurtful digs are too good to miss.

Liam gushed about the fantastic Rytmos in a recent YouTube video where he described the gem as a music lesson hiding under the clothes of a puzzle game. Each maze-like puzzle in Rytmos sees you recreating an entire fictional record, so when the credits eventually roll, you’ve essentially been on a world tour through many, many musical genres.

Pushing and pulling boxes is gaming puzzle 101. Inbento has you perform that same classic action with tiny blocks of sticky rice, fish, seaweed, and other yummy stuff that usually goes into bento boxes. It can get tough as hell, but the central cute cat family who pass on recipes with love makes any brain knots worth the pain.

Birth as a title evokes so much mystery, but it’s essentially just Frankenstein without all the murder and mental agony. You collect bones and other organs from alleyways, coffee shops, and wherever else you can find them to create a creature. Why? Because you’re lonely, which does kinda imply lots of mental agony now that I think about it, but I swear it's more relaxing than that sounds.

The Cerebral Puzzle Showcase runs until August 7th over on Steam. Other RPS favourites on sale include the existential clockwork contraption Outer Wilds, first-person puzzly platformer Supraland, philosophical test chamber marathon The Talos Principle, brilliant murder mystery The Case Of The Golden Idol, and the compact strategy game Into The Breach. Your turn, readers - what should I open my wallet for?