confounding calendar 2025 just concluded! i followed these games a bit more closely this year than previously (which was a lot easier to do since there weren't multiple releases in a single day!) here's the stuff that caught my eye / that i really liked.
this post will be spoiling stuff so you should play the games here before i talk about them! here's everything i'm going to mention after the break:
this bubble tea troubles me: https://scottg.itch.io/bubble-tea
lessons on strange symbols: https://nants00.itch.io/lessons-on-strange-symbols
loopmaker: https://torcado.itch.io/loopmaker
a short bike: https://werxzy.itch.io/a-short-bike
confounding calendar 2025
showy homes
this was a wordle puzzle that turns into a path drawing logic puzzle! the reveal was really nicely done visually and working out what the solution had to be felt tight and well authored. i lacked the general knowledge required to understand the bonus idea, but still felt it was cool and serendipitous that such an idea could be included in this puzzle at all. brilliant
dual threaded
this was a super pretty grid logic puzzle with a minimally illustrated ruleset. i figured out what the rules were trying to tell me and worked out a solution from there. i'm a big fan of puzzles like this where you get to draw on them and your final solution automatically looks really pretty :) i didn't save my solve but suffice to say it looked awesome
tricky tangled train tracks
this one is interesting because at it's core it's basically just a maze, but it's really hard. the game kind of throws you for a loop initially because there's a marker showing the first four spots you're supposed to hit, and the third one is definitely not the one you expect. if you ignore the hint and decide to hit a different third spot, it doesn't work!
from there solving is this weird experience of trying to figure out, with any next move you make, whether the train can actually loop around and hit the spots that you passed by along the way. there's a few really tight turns in the final leg that juuuuuust barely work, it's really flashy
this bubble tea troubles me
there's a bunch of puzzlescript sokoban games in these collections, and i sort of expect many of them not to pique my interest because they're laser focused on the appeal being whatever mechanic they came up with and nothing else. this entry however is different because the theme of it is really striking!
i got stuck in a spot and i personally felt like the hint provided on the page was anti-helpful. the actual aha is quite good! if you happen to be stuck in the spot i was (which, i guess is unlikely since i said at the top of this post that i would be spoiling things), see if you can figure out what the key move is starting from this position:
lessons on strange symbols
i don't really need to say anything about this one, it should be clear what made me remember this after playing through it :)
loopmaker
if torcado makes something, it's basically guaranteed to be technically and visually incredible. it's so in line with them that we got an image puzzle with a full-feature embedded image editor that, unlike any other image editor i've ever used for a puzzle page, is specifically optimized for drawing freehanded lines. insane.
and that's not to mention the actual puzzles, which get pretty tough and gritty! especially the endgame, which is kind of unfathomable.
a short bike
one of those sokoban games where your movement is complete bullshit, but it's super visually striking and i enjoyed figuring out how to get from point a to point b, multiple times. definitely the hardest part is figuring out what to do with the two boxes on the right side of the level - once you have that, reaching the finish from there doesn't require any more difficult tricks.
some other ones i liked that you could also check out are Deductopia: Scout Camp, The Stupefying Sweater, and 5buttons, but that's everything i had a real thing to say about :) there's gonna be some bonus games coming out in january but i want to get this post out before the month is over so there you go
my friend made me play SliceCraft from the previous confounding calendar. i did see that the squishraft dev made this last year but decided not to try it for some reason. now i have played it and solved it and can confirm it's properly cursed
i don't have any real thoughts just wanted to say a thing that happened to me
i haven't really been following the confounding calendar space this year, but i had a quick look at their listing today and i found this deduction puzzle pretty nice:
Bring your pet to school day didn't go as planned
lots of nice little realization moments in this - some more logic-y, and some more detective-y. i especially like what they did with the kid in the upper right desk!
ah, really liked Meta Knight from today's Confounding Calendar 2023 drop! it's another one of those puzzles that seems like it'll just be a trial-and-error solve until you start coming up with a plan.
you can try it here, then i'll explain stuff in the rest of the post
so the idea is that the positions of the green boxes determine which squares you can move the green boxes to. you can play around with it some and realize some key details, like how if you ever have a situation where there's no boxes on any given side or corner of the puzzle, then the boxes can never be moved in that direction ever again, or how if you get all of the boxes in positions with certain symmetries, then you can get some even/odd parity or even some hexagonal-shaped parity which is super wild lol
the fun bit that i ended up noticing which leads to a solution is that there's exactly one way to order the boxes such that each one's position lets you move the next one in the chain into the required spot, looks something like this:
so if you had the boxes placed on these numbers, then the 3 box lets you complete the 4 box, the 2 box lets you complete the 3 box, the 1 box lets you complete the 2 box, and the 1 box completes itself.
the solution doesn't pan out exactly like that, but once i had this configuration in mind, i started setting it up and the solve happened pretty quickly afterward.
edit: actually i lied! the solution does work exactly like that and you can set it up in exactly 4 moves, so you can solve the whole thing in only 8 moves. i noticed that while i was trying to fall asleep for the night. you know it's a good puzzle when you're still thinking about it while trying to fall asleep for the night
i found that logic pretty enjoyable! thanks beekie
right away, on day 2, The Blot Thickens from the 2023 confounding calendar is excellent!
your goal is to paint the picture onto the canvas, where every time you move your cursor, it darkens the square that you land on. it's tricky! i'm going to use the rest of this post to explain the logic i found in it, which will spoil the solution, so give it a try first before reading on
okay, had a go? you probably found it difficult to color everything in the middle, especially the pesky spot in the center of their forehead.
the key is to look closely at the set of squares in the middle and do some counting.
here, i've taken the picture and marked some of the squares in the middle with a pink square and an A. these are the cells that seem difficult to color correctly. then, i've taken all of the colored cells surrounding the A cells and marked them with a yellow circle and a B.
notice that in order to color any of the A cells, you first have to have stepped onto and colored a B cell before moving into the A cell, then you have to leave the A cell and color another B cell. in other words, any sequence of moves that colors an A cell looks like ...BAB...
what's the most efficient way to color all A cells that minimizes the number of B cells colored? it would require you to perfectly alternate between A cells and B cells until all of the A cells are colored in.
in this scheme, it would take N+1 colorings of B cells to color the A cells N times.
if you do some counting, it turns out that in the final picture, the A cells collectively need to be colored exactly 16 times, while the B cells collectively need to be colored exactly 17 times.
so this minimum arrangement of moves, the most efficient possible way to color all of the A cells, has to be what we actually do! any other method would color the B cells too many times.
in effect, it means that our solve path has to enter the set of B cells, step into and color completely all of the A cells, and then leave the set of B cells immediately afterward, all in one go. that's this H-shaped region here:
okay, so that narrows down the general structure of the solution. we could go in and try a bunch of stuff until something works, but we can make an argument that narrows things down even further:
notice the cells at the top of the H-shaped region, on the antlers. these B cells are interesting because they're each only adjacent to one A cell, and it's an A cell that's the same color as them.
imagine if your singular path through the H-shaped region tried to color one of these B cells somewhere in the middle of the path. then you would have to surround each coloring of those cells with the adjacent A cell, so it would look like:
some portion of the path here ... A B A B A B A ... some portion of the path here
that colors the B cell 3 times, but it colors the A cell 4 times! which is too many. that means this can't be the path - this particular B cell can only be colored at the beginning or end of the path:
start of the path B A B A B A ... the rest of the path
that way, we color the B cell 3 times and color the adjacent A cell the same number of times.
but, because there are two of these B cells, and there's only one beginning of the path and one ending of the path, these two cells have to be the start and end of the path exactly!
that gives us an even narrower picture of what the final solution path must look like.
from there it should be super solvable, as long as you color the eyes carefully. in more detail, the path that works looks like:
enter one of the antlers, and color it completely
color the space between the antlers and the middle space on the forehead
move into one of the spaces above one of the eyes, color both of the eyes, then end in the space above the other eye
color the middle space on the forehead one more time
exit through the other antler, coloring it completely
