I smash a window to alert a bot to my presence—it notices me and plots a path to my location, a dingy storage closet. The only available path I’ve given it is through flames. You see, it’s not exactly a smart bot, it’s just heeding its programming to attempt to neutralize me, the intruder. One pass through the flames isn’t enough to do it in, so I dodge it, give it a few additional thwacks with my wrench, and tease it through the fire again. The scorched bot falls to the ground, its systems permanently damaged.

The game checks off a puzzle objective: neutralize an enemy using fire.

This is High Entropy, a puzzle game by binarynonsense.

Take the elevator, please

High Entropy takes inspiration from many games, borrowing mechanics but using them in its own way to form a cohesive puzzle system.

The game takes place in a “test chamber” structure, like the seminal puzzle game, Portal. You enter a puzzle from one elevator, complete a list of objectives, and make your way to the elevator at the end of the level. You pick up keycards, master keys, and other similar knickknacks to make progress.

The game’s Fallout-style lockpicking mechanic takes the challenge and advances it another degree. You have to find bobby pins scattered throughout the level, and as a consumable resource, you only get a few attempts to access doors for different paths or items—occasionally forcing a restart if you want to 100% the level.

The game also doesn’t shy away from being inspired by immersive sims, like Deus Ex. The very first passcode to unlock a door is 0451—as is tradition. PC terminals are used to read emails and notes for the puzzles. There’s also the occasional spam email to ignore, naturally.

DOS-style command lines also form another part of the puzzle. The industrial office spaces here often have access controlled doors, security cameras, or laser trip beams securing these test chambers, and you use the PC to control them. You usually have some sort of note or tip nearby if you forget the syntax, but one-shotting a netmap followed by a telnet to disable a security system leaves you feeling like a bonafide pentester.

This game rewards exploration and discovery in the form of origami cranes. To 100% a level, you need to seek out all the hidden rooms and puzzle elements. Because there are several possible solutions to later levels, the origami cranes ensure you’ve seen what you need to see to prove you can solve all the routes—but still leaves you the ability to pick your own path forward.

The Orange Box?

The level design of High Entropy basically amounts to polished yet pragmatic minimalism. In the version I played, the aesthetic is really just polished greybox¹, but it is used skillfully in a manner that makes the design feel intentional, not unpolished.

It owns the format, and it’s used in a way that evokes a rough industrial office building format, giving the nod to the gridded concrete walls you see in Portal. It works—I had too many good looking screenshots to pick from.

Puzzle Quality and Mechanics

The last levels of High Entropy are more significant in scope and amp up the duration. You’re expected to use every mechanic you’ve learned in the earlier levels, and getting 100% doesn’t just mean finding every path, but also following the right routes at the right time. Some hit a level of difficulty where it feels better to quit out and revisit it again in a few hours. Of course, it does feel rewarding to eventually finish a level you’ve been stuck on, once you’ve figured out just what you’ve missed.

Around level thirteen, I realized the game is also being optimized for speedrunning². Restarting a few times to sequence my route in just the right order, I realized that the walking bots are timed so you can flow through some rooms in just one-cycle of the bots.

It’s excellent work for a one-person game. Sure, a few puzzles could make better use of player hinting. I got very stuck in a 100% attempt of level seven—an area I was trying to access was pitch black, and there was nothing to hint to me to look there. Scratches, wear patterns, or a telltale light would have helped me to discover the new route to take. After about twenty minutes of searching, I found that I needed to hop on top of a vending machine. The game is typically successful with this, though. It also offers interactive outlines for things you can interact with, but often the outlines don’t appear until you’re already close enough to the object you need to interact with, so they don’t actually help with discovering things you’re missing.

I played High Entropy version 0.3.1. My play time was just over three hours. It is available on itch.io for windows, but a full release will be available on Steam. The game is a test build, but don’t let that deter you from playing—a story mode is coming soon for the Steam release, which will probably add an overarching narrative for the existing puzzles.

Bird of Passage, by SpaceBackyard, is an atmospheric narrative puzzle, set in taxi cabs traveling the streets of Tokyo.

You play as a low-poly ghost-bird-eye-thing (a technical term, of course), and you travel at night in taxis, recounting your stories to the drivers who take you around. It turns out that the ghost you embody died in the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, and is seeking answers as they continue along their path.

The atmosphere and vibrancy of the deconstructed Tokyo are lovely. The game boils down its vision of Tokyo to just the bare essentials to deliver its view of Tokyo—a taxi cab, various taxi stops, bright lights, and road markings all serve to give you the feel of a big city without actually rendering a big city.

This is a perfect game for a pensive dark rainy day. It’s not quite the same, but I found myself getting lost in thoughts in this game—like when you’re a passenger in a long car ride and your mind starts to drift.

Gameplay Tip:

It’s not necessarily easy to intuit the best choices to progress the story. For the best route to the end of the game, and to avoid repetition, keep track of your dialogue choices. One of the taxis you enter will give you a hint for what you’re looking for—once you heed their tip, the route to get to the end of the game will be clear enough with a little bit more trial and error.

My playtime of Bird of Passage was about 30 minutes—but yours can be a bit shorter with the non-spoiler gameplay tip above. It is available on itch.io for macOS and Windows.

Eat The Rich is a…satirical capitalist shopping simulator? Yeah, that’s probably a good way to describe it.

You take indirect control of a mob of puffy pink eraser people who are stampeding a department store on Black Friday, grabbing and buying everything you can find. Fetch all the TVs, shopping carts, and toilets you can, and run out with the sweet, sweet savings.

This game had me giggling like a fool. It feels like a perfect juxtaposition of Octodad and Happy Wheels in all the best, silly ways. The blobby eraser people flail around with such absurdity that, when you take control, you can’t help but just laugh as they stumble about the world, falling over themselves trying to navigate around the store.

And how can I forget Jeff Bezos! You’re literally running around a store named Bezos. Literally taking all the money and extra savings to be had from the capitalist-king himself. It doesn't get better than this, folks.

Truthfully, this game is closer to a short prototype, but the content that’s here is just so silly and compelling that it’s absolutely worth it to spend ten minutes and go through the content that’s here. There’s no failure condition as far as I can tell, just pure silliness.

You’ll spend ten minutes crying with laughter while playing Eat The Rich, and it’s available on itch.io for Windows.

Speak Easy, by Shots on Sunday, is a prohibition-era bartending game set in a 1920s-era Chicago.

You take the role of Ruth Moran, bartender, and proprietor of an illicit speakeasy, named “The Straight and Narrow.” Set over three nights, you serve drinks to a revolving cast of characters dropping into your speakeasy. You prepare them a spread of drinks, at their request, from your elegantly drawn and well-used recipe book.

“The Straight and Narrow,” your speakeasy, is set in a smoky Art Deco style as you’d find in the world of BioShock. Inter-day story exposition in Speak Easy is told through slides depicting a vignette of Ruth’s world and inner thoughts, but the biggest story beats come through your interactions with patrons.

You see unrequited love between two patrons—a doctor and his patient. Sapphire Riviera, another patron, is far too drunk and is claiming to be a star that you should already know. Pearl is an intoxicated police officer, and realistically, a patron you’re perhaps too friendly with—considering the prohibition, y’know. Of course, you also have the occasional drop-ins of the heavy fist of the mob supplying your speakeasy.

The interactivity of the bartending in Speak Easy is well considered, and is easily the best part of the game. Yes, Speak Easy certainly shares mechanical similarities with VA-11 HALL-A, the highly acclaimed cyberpunk visual novel, but the bartending in VA-11 HALL-A is more “click to mix.” Speak Easy’s bartending feels more real—you’re grabbing bottles from the shelves, picking up and squeezing the fruit, and shaking up drinks (with your mouse!) while preparing drinks for customers.

In terms of polish, I’d like for the ability to increase dialogue print speed. Also, even though it’s not necessarily a “choices-matter” style game, I felt like there was inflexibility to some dialogue—I wound up sternly kicking out a customer, where I’d have preferred an option to ask them to leave more politely.

This is an excellent showing from a student team of ten. It’s worth dropping in to chat with a few patrons, make a few drinks, and learn a bit about Ruth’s story. My playtime in Speak Easy was about an hour, and the game is available for Windows on itch.io.

You’re approaching a lodge in the wilderness. As you near, you see the flash of two gunshots, followed by sharp drum beats and a jump cut to black.

These are the first moments of Once Upon a Crime in the West, a narrative murder mystery game, by developer National Insecurities, exclusively available in the Humble Monthly Trove.

On the twelfth day of Christmas


As you enter the cabin, you encounter an array of highly-stylized corpses strewn about and find the bartender impaled with a knife in his eye, beckoning you in. It’s the twelfth day of Christmas, and it’s a good one—“except for all of these dead folk,” the bartender quips. The bartender instructs you to use a magical camera—conveniently left on a nearby table—to step back and relive scenes from the previous eleven days, to figure out just what happened here.

You’ll meet a spread of characters with different personalities and reasons for being at this cabin over the twelve days of Christmas. Some are there to get away. Others, mercenaries, trying to find who killed the old sheriff of Old Town. You’ll also meet the new sheriff of New Town—who might also be the new sheriff of Old Town? (It’s hard to keep track.)

You should already be able to tell this isn’t a game that takes itself too seriously. The game is rife with black comedy, witty writing, and silly on-screen gags. Scene changes are accentuated with sharp drum beats and quick cuts. The bartender, Elijah, throws a coin in the swear jar every time he swears—a gag which does not get old. Even the people staying with you at the lodge are hardly fazed by an on-screen death during a poker game—instead joking about it after a moment of reaction.

It’s familiar, but not too familiar

Sure, this game bears substantial mechanical similarities to Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn, but that doesn’t detract from it. The colorful and stylized low-poly character graphics are a sharp departure from Pope’s title, and this game has an entirely different spirit and gravity to such a similar situation.

In a way, it’s also a step up in difficulty from Return of the Obra Dinn. After you finish watching the events of the prior eleven days of Christmas, you’re left to deduce what happened by linking polaroid pictures of characters together. The game doesn’t hand hold you during this point—you need to rely on your notes and memory of the dialogue to make these connections. Perhaps the game should allow you to rewatch previous scenes, but this also feels like an extra challenge, one that’s extra rewarding once you’ve made all of your logical conclusions. (If you get stuck, I do have a screenshot of the solution—I can quietly provide it so you can finish out the game. Keep your game open, there’s no saving.)

Gameplay Tip

You can play the scenes in any order, but it seems best to start from the First Day of Christmas. Also, I did encounter some oddities when just starting the game, after placing the camera and scrolling to switch days—the game wouldn’t respond to my scroll wheel. If this happens, you may be standing too close to the camera, somehow. I was able to get it to work if I stepped back.

Once Upon a Crime In the West is available for Windows, exclusively in the Humble Monthly Trove. My playtime was about two hours. It’s worth a shot if you enjoyed Return of the Obra Dinn, or are just up for a comedic murder mystery.