admin Developer Mark Ffrench has carved out a unique niche on Steam, regularly releasing logic puzzle games of enormous scope and surprising depth. This was the case in 2024, among others Spellsa wall-sized puzzle based on the painting Netherlandish Proverbs by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and 2024: Mosaic Retrospectivewhich contained dozens of interlocking images recalling important events from throughout the year. Next Mosaic of the Pharaohs Earlier this year we now have the most comprehensive entry yet: Mosaic of the strange– a game that combines the same logic puzzle conceit with a gritty point-n-click adventure.
Right, describing a logic puzzle is always the most off-putting and joy-destroying process, so bear with me before we get back to the fun stuff:
To get everyone on the same page, fill-a-pix is one of the many logic puzzle types from puzzle masters Conceptiswhere you fill in a grid based on Minesweeper lines. Each number in the grid indicates the number of cells to be shaded in the three-by-three grid of which it is at the center. So a “6” on the side of a puzzle means that all six cells are shaded, while a “0” in the middle means you can remove its nine cells from overlapping clues. The more you play, the more familiar you become with certain patterns, such as the consequences of having a “6” and a “3” in two adjacent cells (you must shade the three cells to the left of the 6 and eliminate the three to the right of the 3), and much more. Okay, okay, we’re done.
The way Ffrench implements this is by creating huge mosaics segmented into individual puzzles, and rewarding the completion of most of them with little pop-up information. In Spells they were details about each of the proverbs depicted in the enormous painting. In 2024 they were details of the events of that year. But inside Mosaic of the strangeit’s all quite different. The details that appear are documents, mostly about conspiratorial mysteries, as in this game you play as FBI agents investigating a murder.
Officers Cullen and Brady are called in after a body is found in a gruesome condition, with the circumstances of the man’s death a crazy mess of mystery. And instead of solving multiple puzzles on one wall, the process of completing the grids here is how you explore the items in the rooms. Okay, yes, it’s fake. You’re not really playing a point-n-click game in the sense that you’re actually deriving anything, but with each item solved you get a document relating to a particular topic, perhaps cryptids or UFOs or mysterious disappearances from lonely lighthouses, all of which add up to evidence that you can stick up on the noticeboard in your office. You’ll also visit the coroner’s office, the murder victim’s apartment, and elsewhere, where you can find a total of 144 puzzles and documents.
Various items spark conversations between the characters, making what would otherwise be a more sterile puzzle game feel much more alive and deep, and the result is something engaging both in terms of story and puzzling. Ffrench has nailed the way he approaches the challenges, with clever, context-sensitive hints if you want them, and a prompt that appears if you’ve unknowingly gone too horribly wrong. Plus, in this game you can massively change the difficulty of the puzzles in a way that I love.
You can make things so simple that you’re essentially painting by numbers, or you can make it so challenging in steps that each puzzle is a dizzying ordeal on the scale of Tametsi. I’ve usually been a step down from last, but it’s fun to scale it up to the hardest point and really have to look for every super complex number pattern. Even better, you can change that difficulty at any time, halfway through solving a grid.
Okay, I was totally nerdy, but trust me, you’ve never played anything like this before Mosaic of the strangeand you get o’clock entertainment for your $12. I can’t wait to see what Ffrench does next, especially if these games continue to evolve in their current direction.
