What Are We Playing [Mar 2026]
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
This month’s What Are We Playing includes puzzle boxes, a video game, and a comic book game. The theme this month is feeling very out of this world, with several cosmic selections.
Part of the CluePuzzle series, The Wonderbox of Alice is a puzzle box game where assembling the jigsaw pieces reveals memorable scenes from Alice’s adventure and triggers hidden mechanisms within the box. This is a game that doubles as a display piece, and even the unboxing was a delight.
The debut of IDventure’s CluePuzzle series was enjoyable, though I’ll admit this one feels like it kicks everything up a notch and experiments more with the format. It’s satisfying to see an evolution with each box they design—it’s not just a repetition of the same thing each time. The mechanics and signposting were clear throughout, with lots of fun reveals and “aha” moments along the way. If you like jigsaw puzzles and neat mechanisms, this a great choice for a chill solo session.
Time: ~2 hours Difficulty: 2/5
Escape Comics: The Alien Ship is a immersive sci-fi puzzle game built around a 27-page comic book. With physical components woven into the story, it plays like an escape room in a box. You’re captaining a team that’s trying to board a mysterious alien vessel, uncover its intentions, and save humanity.
The instructions are clean and lean, which was the first thing to immediately impress me. The conceits for the hint system and solution checker are also cleverly integrated into the sci-fi theming rather than dropped in as an afterthought. Then you actually start playing and find a whole comic book inside! There are also a bunch of neat components that tie back into the story, including some genuinely surprising life-sized props. The components were packed in a way that was player-friendly as well as efficient, and the pacing felt right on point.
Hint cards were not only useful but written in-world, which is a nice touch. I am personally not a big fan of score keeping in games, so I wasn’t too concerned with tracking this mechanic, but it does have a fun payoff. The art makes this a pretty unique product in the puzzle genre, and feels like a graphic novel crossed with a Star Trek episode—the story is light but full of character. It’s also easy to reset and pass along, which is always a plus! They’ve been working on this game for several years now, and that’s evident in its level of polish.
I received a preview copy from the publisher to provide my honest review, because Escape Comics: The Alien Ship launches on Kickstarter at the end of this month!
Time: 2-4 hours
Difficulty: 2.5/5
As Dusk Falls is a choice-based narrative game with strong characters and high-stakes situations, reminiscent of Telltale Games and the Life is Strange series.
While the point of view shifts occasionally, you mainly play as one character. Choices that you make can have massive consequences, and to some degree, the game allows you to explore the storyline to see other outcomes, giving you the chance to override your save or simply explore. I don’t always take advantage of the exploration feature, but the story here was compelling enough that I actually wanted to go back and replay certain scenes to make different choices and see the other outcomes. It was satisfying to see that among the small details, there were also some more consequential differences in outcome.
The art style is a bit odd, like an animatic made of painted-over photos and 3D assets, but the writing felt right for the characters and the voice acting really brought the story to life. There are two “books” across six chapters, and the second ends on a cliffhanger with no continuation currently planned. This was a disappointing note to end on, as I would have been satisfied with the way the story wrapped up if it weren’t for the cliffhanger. If you like narrative choice games, this one is definitely worth trying.
Time: 7-9 hours
Difficulty: 1/5
Occlude describes itself as “cosmic-horror solitaire,” where each game is a particular type of ritual with its own secret rules you need to discover.
Playing this brought me back to Solitaire on the family computer as a kid, only this time it was also layered in puzzle. Figuring out the rules for each ritual was not easy, and I was almost surprised to find I had more fun just playing Solitaire than I did puzzling out what the rules actually were. That’s probably a reflection of my own impatience than a flaw in the game, though sometimes it felt like a Mastermind-style puzzle turned into a lateral thinking puzzle. Careful observation and meticulous note-taking are required throughout. While most of the game felt fair, the one part that truly frustrated me turned out to involve outside knowledge I didn’t have.
There was a fun build-up to the way you obtain clues throughout the game that end up being used in the final ritual. You earn artifacts by getting a full coin score on each ritual, and those feed into the final challenge. I wished the artifacts were cluing other rituals along the way rather than only the very last one, but this is a minor complaint. Overall, it’s an interesting take on card-based logic and observation puzzles. Try the demo if it sounds up your alley!
Time: ~7-9 hours
Difficulty: 4/5
Part of the Inscape Box series, Cosmic Artifact is a wooden puzzle box with hidden compartments and sequential mechanical puzzles to work through. There’s something a little ironic about a “cosmic” artifact made entirely of wood, but I can suspend my disbelief.
The box has some neat mechanisms, and the majority of the puzzles were genuinely fun to solve. A handful of the mechanisms felt tight or poorly calibrated, and one item within the artifact would have been a real showstopper if it had worked better in practice. It wasn’t essential to the puzzle though, so thankfully it didn’t derail things too much. A numeric code that comes up several times throughout also suffered from unclear orientation, which caused more friction than it should have.
My biggest frustration was agonizing over what should have been a simple puzzle because it seemed that my box had been assembled incorrectly. The hint system saved me here, so I was grateful it had photos to show what elements and solutions were supposed to look like. The final drawer in my copy was also stuck, requiring disassembly to get inside, which made finishing feel anticlimactic. After writing all of this up, I learned the assembly I thought was wrong was actually an intentional design challenge to increase difficulty. Unfortunately it made an otherwise fun puzzle feel tedious rather than challenging. Between that and the stuck drawer, the manufacturing inconsistency is hard to ignore. This is an otherwise fun puzzle box, so I hope other customers have better luck.
Time: ~1-2 hours
Difficulty: 2/5
What have you been playing lately?