Mind Games

Mind Games is a somewhat badly presented collection of puzzle minigames, all revolving around logical deduction/placement/guessing where to click. Most of the puzzles are the kind where you click or tap on one square/hex, and adjacent "related" tiles will do something as well. You need to work out which tiles are related and how, then click to make them all the same colour, etc etc. You get the idea... there's thousands of games like this for free on mobile and as browser games. So why is a poor quality example like this on Steam as a paid product?

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The game features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. While the artwork itself, while mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible, it might as well be a slideshow or a Youtube video. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids had more advanced animation and visuals going on than this game does.

Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature.

The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.

For gameplay purposes, because the user interface for this game is mostly just 2D static images... it might as well be a browser game. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

Mind Games didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for finishing the first puzzle, trivial to get, but less than 34 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

So, should you buy this game?

Mind Games is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

HARD! These are challenging puzzles that when you finally solve them, you get a major dopamine hit! Even the instructions are a puzzle to be deciphered on some games and to that point, for those complaining about the ambiguity of the instructions, you probably won't be able to solve some of the problems if you can't reason out the instructions, just saying.
After awhile the games become redundant and I would start skipping repetitive games (clicking on the back button 100 times) and moving on to the games I enjoyed solving or that got me my achievements.
I got this game because it boasted a challenge and it did not disappoint. It was only a couple bucks so I'd say worth it.

Lazy, amateurish. It's just a set of mediocre puzzles known from other games. The difficulty is all over the place — some puzzles are nearly impossible. There are too many combination puzzles, some are downright insane — with no real strategy other than brute force.

The presentation is too simple, with cheap stock graphics, no consistent style and barely any animations. UI doesn't help you much, sometimes it even gets in the way, like in the dice sudoku puzzle, when you select a die, it turns black and the number disappears, so you don't know what number was there. Puzzle descriptions are too brief and incomplete, sometimes they don't even specify the goal.

If you're a puzzle enthusiast, you may find some fun in the game, but you'll find the same puzzles in every other hidden-object game and they will be much more polished.

PS: Click a button 100 times to skip the puzzle. Are you serious??

Difficulty in winning the various games presented is not the issue with Mind Games. Difficult puzzles are perfectly fine. The issue comes with incredibly poor instructions. In-game instructions appear to be poorly translated or expect the player to already have an in-depth knowledge of these puzzles beforehand. You're expected to know how the puzzle mechanics work with no explanation of how pieces or moves work or even what the goal of any given puzzle actually is.

The difficulty of games like this should come from proper execution of available moves, not needing to bang your head against a wall every level because the rules are unclear. If the developer would like the rules to remain unclear I would recommend removing the instruction/hint screen entirely. Starting from zero knowledge of how a puzzle works would be better than the incoherent mess on the levels I played.

Hard pass on this one. Cheap, yes. But far from enjoyable.

Игра представляет из себя сборник головоломок, некоторые из которых я даже ни разу не видел в бесплатных браузерках.
Список всего напиханного очень обширен и проходить это все можно очень долго.
Здесь и пятнашки, и двухмерный кубик рубика, и задачки с расстановкой шахмат, и судоку, и т.д., но проблема в том, что почти каждый тип задач встречается в игре около десяти раз без значительного отличия одной задачи от другой.
Приходится десять раз отыгрывать мадагаскарские шашки, десять раз собирать магические квадраты из домино (причем, если не сильно вдаваться в математику и возможные комбинации, то каждый раз придется сидеть по полчаса-час над одинаковой задачей...), и так далее.
И всего 200 уровней так. В конце игроку дадут ачивку... Если он потрудится залезть в руководства, чтобы решить проблему с багом - один из уровней не дает продолжить игру.

В дополнение к неоправданным повторениям слишком схожих задач имеется:
Баги, пропадающие текстуры, артефакты на экране;
Отсутствие настроек внутри игры (при переходе на каждый новый уровень играет какая-то композиция и тишина... В итоге и подкаст нормально не послушать, и внутриигровую музыку не оставить);
Крайне плохой подбор текстур. У меня есть подозрения, что авторы просто натаскали текстуры из других игр, и кое-как их совместили. В пределах одного экрана видны отличия в детализации и отличия в разрешении текстур;
Да и просто нет общей стилистики - изначально игра собиралась из нескольких разных игр поменьше;
Полная линейность при прохождении, отчего нельзя оставить сложную задачку на потом;
Супер-стремный выбор первой задачи, которая выглядит как баг. Я перезагрузил игру несколько раз, пока пытался понять в чем дело, перешел на следующую задачу, и ачивку за первый уровень пропустил.

6/10
Сборник крупный, но выполнено фигово.
За 16 рублей ну такое себе.

I enjoy it but it's not for everyone. If you like to be served up some random puzzle/game challenges, it's perfect. No story, no real progression except for getting to the next puzzle. Nice for a short distraction (in small chunks) -- but the puzzles do get repetitive over time. You can skip a puzzle by hitting reset 100 consecutive times, but there's no returning to it in the future, so you are truly giving up.

Was hoping for new and challenging logic puzzles. What i got was poor interface, terrible instructions, and overused puzzle cliches. you could find better coded, better explained, and free games individually online on any flash game website. A disapointment. Not worth any money, let alone the asking price.

Found this one with a 80% discount (less than 0,50€), and I've never been that satisfied recently with a puzzle game.
It's really really difficult and challenging, and also smooth and fast.
The game consists of dozens and dozens of random puzzles belonging to very different genres (we're going from checkers puzzles to chess, domino, coins puzzles, chinese-type puzzles, lights on/off, I mean, every puzzle game you can think about) and you can also skip them if you're stuck!
Mind Games has also many flaws, anyways; I'd have added for sure some keyboard controls, since you're forced to play only with your mouse: games such as the classic 15 (I really don't know the English name, it's that puzzle in which you have a square composed of 15 numbers and you have to arrange them from the lowest to the highest) are much more enjoyable with WASD keys, but anyways the majority of the puzzles are mouse-based.
Soundtrack sucks but who cares, it's a puzzle game. There aren't also graphics options but to me it runs greatly with the given graphics; lastly, the instructions are often not that thorough so that you have to figure by yourself what to do, but if you've been into puzzle games for a lifetime that should not absolutely be a problem.
This implies of course that I won't recommend this game to players who aren't accustomed to logic/puzzle games since it's pretty hard!
The translation is awful but this goes from the 50€ awesome new games to the lowest ones so I really don't care, and since there's not a plot of course one can keep the game in English ang go with it. Don't even try other languages XD
So, it's true that there are a lot of problems (including the fact that you can't go back to already solved levels) but to me it's been really entertaining and provides a lot of challenge in many levels even if you've been into these games for years and years.
Maybe considering the fact that all the effort the developers put into was in the puzzles themselves and not in everything else the game isn't worth the full price, but since it's often on heavy discounts it deserves definitely a try.

the puzzle is either too easy (since you encounter it thousand times like sudoku), or very hard (not your favorite one like magic squeare domino puzzle). that's happen because of scattering puzzles all around, you get to play a sudoku puzzle first, then you're forced to play another puzzle of domino...

this is very bad for warpping your mind around one puzzle, once you starts to get acquaintance with some puzzle (and develope some techniques), you then force to stop learning it (and maybe forget it) and play another!

so why not just present us one type of puzzle at a time? says, you let me play sudoku for 10 straight levels, then show me another type of puzzle.

the quality of ui / programming also pose problems here, likes:
- bgm is annoying and not repeatable. so when one track stop, another track comes in and change your mood dramatically.
- sometimes, bgm just dead. (then why not make a game w/ no bgm at all? so i can select play my fav youtube playlist in background!)
- there is no hint at all! not even a simple warnning like when you play sudoku and accidently put same numbers in a single row. this is not good design aspect for computer-based puzzle game.
- and there's also no puzzle tracking/memo, for example, a sudoku puzzle without stat counting that how many number you've put there? so you've to recount it every time you curious have you been crossed out this number?

i see the only type of person who would appriciated this game: who've mastered (or nearly mastered) all type of puzzles presented in this game. -- it makes you feel nostalgic.

for others who need to play some puzzle game: just buy a game with one and only type of the puzzle that you want to play, you'll build skills on that puzzle more peacefully.

When I got this game I thought it was going to be a game full of many kinds of different puzzles that I could choose to play any time I'd like. I was mistaken. You don't choose what puzzles you play, the game picks for you. You complete one puzzle to be handed another puzzle with slight description of what the goal is to complete it. It's hard to even skip puzzles and you cannot return to past puzzles without losing your progress.

Now, don't get me wrong, I adore challenging puzzles. I just was sadly mistaken about how the puzzles are arranged in this game. I'm the kind of person that likes to pick the type of puzzles I want to do, not have the game pick for me after every puzzle I complete. Some may love this game and I'm happy they do, but this one isn't for me.

I'm indifferent about this game... there's a lot of puzzles, even the start of the game is a puzzle of it's own. There are plenty to solve, and get difficult as you keep playing and solving more, and a few are a mix of other games (Minesweeper + Battleship, for example) however...

You don't have control of what puzzle to do, there's no hints of how to solve a puzzle, and skipping is a bit tedious to do (have to reset 100 times to skip one puzzle) which is to encourage you to solve the puzzle instead of trying to skip it.

This is more for people seeking a challenge for their mind, not for beginners. Sadly there's no guides to help you out; you're pretty much on your own and any friends who can help you. Achievement hunters beware.

There are technical issues too: Every music track is a different theme than the other (and don't loop), you can't go into window mode (even by alt+enter), can't adjust the audio levels in-game, and alt-tabbing in and out can be rather annoying (alt-tabbing in starts a new track and may cause audio overlapping).

The quality of the game is mediocre, but the puzzles are difficult and may be frustrating to solve.

I'd highly wait for a sale for this game, and wouldn't put it at the top of your wishlist either.

Overall: If you're looking for a challenge in puzzles, get this during a sale and no other puzzle game on your wishlist, otherwise avoid.

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Mind Games features a good selection of traditional puzzles that are right away on the more challenging end of the scale. I would recommend ignoring the negative reviews, more than a few of which seem to think the early Nim puzzle is impossibly hard. If you think you would like the sorts of puzzles shown in the screenshots, you will like this game. If you think peg solitaire is too hard or want totally original puzzles, I'd keep looking.


There are a few negatives in fact that there appears to be no way to play in a window and that you can't select a puzzle to play but must play them in order. Also there are some poor translations in the rules for the puzzles.

Very frustrating, no clear directions as to what to even do... just "solve this!" with no indication as to what even the desired solution is, or how to get there! Wiki and youtube are your friends for this... I cannot in good conscience recommend this game!

Hardest puzzles are the tile picture ones, and the marble one... ofc they're the ones you need to solve for achievements, and the ones with no guides! I lucked out on pic-tiles, but Marble Puzzle eluded me until a friend suggested a link that helped!

For those who go ahead and get this game, for the Marble Puzzle at end, this link is very very extremely helpful: https://ruwix.com/twisty-puzzles/hungarian-rings-sliding-puzzle/

Now that it's 100%'ed, never playing this game again!

I have been enjoying this Android game for a while now, so i thought i could reward the developers by buying it on Steam. However, the experience on the PC is seriously lacking: no menu, no windowed-mode, no level select... There's a pseudo "skip level" feature, but it's quite non-intuitive. At least there are some nice achievements... but even those were buggy until recently.

Bottom line: i can only recommend the Android version, instead of this one. Though i still hope i will be able to change this review after some major improvements are introduced.

PS Their statement in the game description, that "Only one out of ten people can solve the first puzzle!"... seems completely made up.

First impression: puzzle collection

This is a simple collection of a few more or less well known puzzles. They're good for a cheap diversion. It doesn't actually have a level selection screen (at least i haven't found any). Since there seem to be at least 200 puzzles organized into several types, that is quite weird.

The game runs well on my old Windows XP computer.

I honestly hate the first (real) puzzle. You're basically waiting for the AI to make a mistake in its move, there's no actual way to beat it other than by chance.
It's quite ridiculous. Not ridiculously hard, just ridiculous.

Puzzles aren't original; mostly lifted from other games or common traditional puzzles. The instructions are in broken English and the production quality is shocking.

The difficulty level is artificially increased. The best exemple to describe this is like "Take the Tic-Tact-Toe game, write some code that make the AI invincible an then present the game as challenging". Unfortunately Mind Games starts from a very good and simple ideea but fails to deliver something that is both fun and difficult at the same time. The main complaints are:
- For quite a few puzzles the objective is not clearly stated (ex. for Nim levels, it doesn't say what are the conditions for winning - I had to google Nim in order to figure it out)
- The AI is ridiculously difficult for the firts levels
- The "Skip" button is a joke (really?!!!)
- It was that hard to provide a way to revisit previous levels? Or it was intentionaly ?

Sorry for bad gramma etc

The conclusion: the game should have been polished a litlle bit before release and the description is misleading

'Mind Games' is a collection of several brain teasers. You will recognize some of them, while others may be new to you. Look at the screenshots to get an idea of the kind of problems you will be solving. I think most of them are fun, but some are just frustrating. Yeah, I'm looking at you, "swap the bishops".

Yes, I clicked the button to recommend this game, but just barely. 'Mind Games' has a lot of problems. To be blunt, for the most part it comes across as pretty amateurish:

- There is no in-game menu whatsoever. No basic options e.g. for graphics and sound, but also no menu that shows your progress or that allows you to go back to previous puzzles you may want to replay because you liked them. You have three buttons in-game: one to exit mind games, one to show the instructions for the current level on the screen and one to reset the current level. There is also no hint system or another way to progress in 'Mind Games' when you're stuck at one particular level. Well, because there is an achievement for skipping a level I went looking for the way to do that. Turns out the 'hint' you see in the second screenshot on this product page, i.e. "You can skip the level by pressing left-top reset button 100 times" is no joke. Not very user-friendly, is it?

- The whole audio track is just copied from the game 'The 7th Guest' (also available on Steam). I can't help but wonder if this is even legal, but that's not up to me to look into. But more to the point, 'The 7th Guest' was set in a haunted mansion so the creepy sounds, the ominous music and the maniacal laughter fit that atmosphere. But in 'Mind Games', where you're just solving brain teasers, it feels completely out of place.

- The instructions you get for each brain teaser are written in very bad English. Sometimes this causes you to have no clue at all what you're supposed to do and you'll need to figure it out by trial and error, or by looking up the solution on the net, which spoils the fun, of course. 'Mind games' adresses the player as 'my friend', just like in those terrible e-mails you get when buying something from the countries er... 'on the eastern side of the planet' (Russia, India, China, ...). They don't understand the western side of the globe thinks it's weird to call any and all strangers "my friend".

- Some of the Steam Achievements are bugged. E.g. there are some achievements that require you to complete 40, 100 and 200 levels, but the counters for those 3 achievements is stuck at 6 for me and, according to the discussions forum, for a number of other players, too. According to the same forum, other achievements used to be bugged but were fixed, so maybe the current bugged achievements will get fixed in the near future, as well.

So there you have it. If you like challenging brain teasers and find 'Mind Games' on sale, you have little to lose by buying it. But 'Mind Games' really needs some more work to stop it from sticking out like a sore thumb in the huge selection of puzzle games Steam has to offer. Most notably it needs original and better suited music and sound effects, an in-game menu with at least some basic options and a native English speaker to rewrite the instructions which are hard to understand as they are right now.

The instructions aren't very clear on some puzzles. For example, the one about dice says to click on an adjecent die to "move" in that direction. However, the puzzle fails to even tell you what the objective of the puzzle is. I spent ten minutes randomly clicking on dice until I passed (somehow). On two-player boards, the AI plays ridiculously well (and you always play first), so you spend the entire board playing defensively against a tough opponent.

Overall, the game isn't fun.