Enigmart

This is a bunch of wordpuzzle games within a thin shopping-based story trenchcoat.

The game has 26 word puzzles of varying types for you to solve, many of them food-related. My grandmother, around the turn of the millenium, always had fun puzzle booklets in her house, like crossword puzzles but with more variety in them. This felt like those books. You have things like anagrams, finding hidden words, arranging syllables, cryptogram (which I just used a solver for, since I don't like the process all that much), etc. There was one that completely stymied me even with both hints and I had to look at what other people used to solve it (the true/false puzzle).

There is an overarching story: you're shopping in the store, and there is an app you can use to get discounts on different objects. Each puzzle you solve gives you 25% off that object (although I think you get a different amount for the very first puzzle).

Every 5 puzzles you solve, you get additional chunks of story. The story segments reminded me a bit of Andrew Schulz's wordplay story segments but I can't lay my finger on why. Maybe one part where there's a know-it-all that you show up, and another where someone kind of takes advantage of you and you let it happen (both things that happen pretty often in Andrew Schultz games).

Now why 5 stars if I thought the story was thin? Because I feel like it wasn't accidentally so or lazily so, I feel like the game had a goal on what it wanted to be (a puzzle game) and succeeded at that goal very well in a way that I personally enjoyed.

I had a great time with this.

You need to go to the supermarket for milk, and possibly some MagiMuffins. Except this is no ordinary supermarket! Enigmart has an app which will give you generous discounts - so far, so 2026, except here you have to solve puzzles to get your 25% off.

The puzzles, mostly food-themed, were excellent - mostly pitched at the right level to get my brain going without being too hard. I had to come back to some of them and think again (the Creatine Crunch cereal was maddening until the penny suddenly dropped). And every one gave me that wonderful sense of satisfaction when I figured it out. A hint system is offered relatively late on in the game - I needed to use it twice.

There is a subgenre of IF which deals in wordplay and puzzles, and this is a worthy addition to it. Well done!

Originally written on the intfiction forums.

I first attempted to play this game weeks earlier - on a commute, using my phone, and on spotty public WiFi. Definitely not the ideal conditions. I spent an embarrassing long amount of time stuck on the very first puzzle. Then, when I finally figured it out, I clicked into a few of the other puzzles to find out that some were dependent on pictures that didn’t load, or were laid out in a way where I would need pen and paper to solve. I ran away screaming closed the browser tab and made a note to myself to save this for last, so I could devote brain space to it without putting the game down and moving on to another Spring Thing entry.

I started off with the fill-in-the-blanks and the association puzzles (sandwich cookies and oatmeal variety pack), the ones I found the simplest to get started on. For most of the others I had to use the provided hints for just to get my mind on the right track. Figuring out (Spoiler - click to show)the hair dye and icing puzzles gave me the feeling of accomplishment as equal as completing a short comp game. I made it through about twenty puzzles before the remaining ones frustrated me enough to look up the answer.

In between solving puzzles there is also a story going on. Initially, it seems to be a shopping trip turned app testing stint. Then (Spoiler - click to show)it takes a turn for some themes that are very relevant to what’s going on with corporations and needless changes to processes that everyone has been satisfied with for years. This is going to sound strange from this puzzle-averse mole, but I don’t know if I necessarily needed the frame story. Enigmart’s plot made a lot of good points (Spoiler - click to show)about how corporations consume everything we love like a leech, but it could’ve worked fine as a pure collection of themed puzzles.

I was definitely not the target audience for Enigmart, but after giving it a chance I liked it! The problems felt fair, were well-implemented, and I had fun solving them once I got past the first one. If you really hate puzzles, this game won’t change your mind, and if you’re a puzzle fiend, you’ve probably already jumped on this game already. But if you’re open to being convinced and are ok with being stuck for forty minutes on assigning True/False to cryptic statements, get your thinking caps and writing materials ready - you’ll need them.