Enigmart

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!

There are a lot of crimes to be laid at the door of postmodernism, from academic texts that use up three quarters of their word count twisting themselves into knots at the violence inherent in any act of analysis to the brainwave that led to an unremarkable margarine being marketed as I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, but credit it with this: the idea that every particular narrative voice, in nonfiction as well as in fiction, is an artificial construct, rather than a direct and unmediated expression of the writer’s identity, is these days pretty universally understood. So it’s no great revelation to confess that the Mike Russo who’s offered his opinions on some 700-odd works of IF to date diverges in many respects from the actually-existing fellow currently putting fingers to keys. In most respects, these differences are banal: I doubt any of y’all would be surprised to learn that reviewing-me is much more discursive, nor that intensive joke-workshopping means he comes across as far more clever than the genuine article. But beyond these matters of degree, there are also areas that don’t come up, either because they’re not typically that relevant to talking about IF – like my work in the nonprofit industrial complex – or because they’re not part of what I tend to prioritize when assessing a game.

Puzzle design is a good example of this latter category. When I talk about puzzles in my reviews, I usually focus on how well-integrated they are into a game’s story and how they advance its themes, how they affect the pacing, whether the clueing is fair and if solving them feels like it moves the player ahead, since I think those are the most broadly-applicable ways to evaluate them. But this high-minded focus on design goals and literary function typically pre-empts me from talking about how much of a nerd I am for puzzles, especially of the wordplay variety. Every day I do the Wordle, both Squardles, Bracket City, and several crosswords – so many that I’ve had to intentionally drop some from my quotidian rounds because it was notably eating into my free time. I love a rebus and a not-too-hard anagram, and I especially love a game that’s a collection of brainteasers: your Fool’s Errands, your Professors Layton, your Sage Sanctums Scramble.

As a result, while part of me has to acknowledge that there’s a way in which Enigmart is a bit perfunctory – it’s a collection of the puzzles the author wrote for the monthlong Enigmarch event, gathered together with a couple pages of absurdist story providing connective tissue – a much bigger part of me just squeals in delight at getting to dig into a variety-box of 26 different bite-sized puzzles. There’s a consistent food theme that provides a bit of humor and some gentle prompting in some of the puzzles, but no particular idea is repeated: there are some familiar ones like anagrams and logic puzzles, but also more esoteric challenges involving mixing-and-matching pairs of letters to create words, a Venn-diagram-based puzzle unlike anything I’ve seen before that’s nonetheless immediately intuitive, and even a tricky reverse-Wordle.

The difficulty is generally pitched just right; most range from easy to moderate, with only a few that take more than a couple minutes of thought or require you to stare at the thing until your brain suddenly clicks and gets the solution (though I will say that familiarity with the pop culture of the 80s and 90s is definitely helpful for a few of them). And for the trickier ones, there’s a hint function to help you get over the hump, though it’s only unlocked pretty far into the game – still, I think that’s a reasonable choice since it ensures it’s just there to help you finish up those last couple puzzles you’re not quite getting, rather than pushing people who just don’t get along with these kinds of brainteasers to power through nonetheless.

The implementation is also top-notch – there are all kinds of pictures, drop-down menus, and checklists incorporated which helps keep the puzzles fresh, and I didn’t come across any bugs or interface infelicities. As for that framing story, it’s enjoyably daft but winds up having more layers than it needed to; the conceit is that you’re shopping at a new supermarket where you can get discounts on particular products by solving puzzles in the store’s proprietary app, which is of course silly, but the game surprised me by taking this premise seriously, engaging with questions of privacy and capitalist exploitation while introducing a couple of honest-to-god characters into what’s otherwise a straightforward puzzlefest. As far as I can tell there’s no metapuzzle or branching choices here, which is perhaps a missed opportunity – did I mention how much I adore Fool’s Errand – but it’s still a nice bonus that doesn’t draw too much attention from the puzzle-y main event.

If you’re only interested in IF for its potential to tell a rich story, or if you only like inventory puzzles deeply rooted in a coherent narrative, Enigmart is unlikely to change your preferences. But if you likewise have a suite of puzzle websites you visit every morning as soon as you wake up, I think you’ll also have a great time putting it through its paces. But I do have to levy one complaint: March has 31 days but there are only 26 puzzles in the game, so come on, there has to be a post-festival release with the left-over five, right? I’ll be waiting!

The puzzles are pure self-contained puzzles, mostly word puzzles, mostly unconnected to the theme/story. The story is cute. We played it in a group and the SF IF Meetup, and we had a good time with it.

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.