Room Escape Artist

Another year, another PAX East in the books! PAX East, the annual video game celebration and expo held in Boston every spring, exhibited a ton of new and upcoming games, gaming hardware, and all sorts of gaming paraphernalia. This was a good year for puzzle games, so let’s get right into the highlights.

Pax Rising

PAX Rising is a curated showcase of games that has spotlighted many interesting games over the years. This year’s selection was no different. It’s always one of the most crowded booths, drawing people in with games in a variety of genres. There was a great selection of puzzle-forward games at PAX Rising this year, and I was able to get my hands on all the demos.

Jigrift

Jigrift was a 3D puzzle adventure game where the islands being explored were made up of gigantic jigsaw puzzle pieces. As you explored, collected, and solved, you unlocked more island-sized jigsaw pieces. These pieces were able to be reconfigured in different ways in order to solve puzzles and explore new areas. Playing Jigrift felt like a return to the Nintendo 64 days of playing collectathon platformers. I expect different readers will take that sentence as a positive or negative endorsement based on their own experiences, but I enjoyed the 15-minute demo and look forward to more. Jigrift launches on Steam in 2026.

Gnaw

Redstart Interactive’s Gnaw combined metroidvania gameplay with a stylized, almost comic book-y civilization of dinosaurs. The demo for Gnaw played like a classic metroidvania: beat a boss, collect a power, use it to move further about the map, and so on, all while exploring a city of dinos in deepening decay. There is currently a demo available on Steam, but there is no anticipated release date at this time.

HeartLinks: A Puzzle Called Love

Flip Alive Games’ HeartLinks: A Puzzle Called Love was a first-person physics-based puzzle game that took place in an anime high school. In the demo, the protagonist showed up to school only to find that somehow everything in the school had been frozen in time – classmates, desks, everything. Puzzles were solved by using special powers to selectively freeze and unfreeze objects in order to reach each stage’s goal. As might be expected, there was also a subplot of unrequited love. HeartLinks: A Puzzle Called Love releases in 2026, and there is a demo available on Steam.

Project Lexa

Project Lexa from Ward Games was a sci-fi language mystery. Your ship crash landed on a strange planet, and everything was written in an alien language. Gameplay in the Project Lexa demo revolved around deciphering unknown glyphs and exploring the ship (and eventually the planet). It was reminiscent of other translation games like Chants of Sennaar. Project Lexa currently has no listed release date.

The Secret of Crystal Mountain

The Secret of Crystal Mountain from Revolutron felt like playing an homage to the great puzzle-y exploration games from the Nintendo64 era. The hero was a humble mail delivery cat just trying to make a delivery, but got caught up with finding magical items and fighting enemies in order to survive the trek up the titular Crystal Mountain. Combat and exploration felt natural, and I look forward to exploring the mysterious island when it releases. The Secret of Crystal Mountain currently has no anticipated release date.

Something Special

PAX East always has a variety of booths dedicated to hardware: PC upgrades, audio-visual equipment, and so on. One booth this year had something very unique, a product called Omara, which is being billed as a “personal scent display.” It’s a small piece of hardware that connects to a VR headset or PC and deploys scents based on what is happening in the game you’re playing. There are 16 scents built into an Omara cartridge that game developers build triggers for into their game. If, for example, your character wanders into a forest Omara puts out a puff of ‘evergreen’ scent. There was a beach scent, a smoky scent, a barnyard scent, and a dozen more.

This was a product right up my alley; I know from all the stares and questions that I’ve gotten over the years that I sniff things more than most people do. However, there are not many games that support Omara at time of writing, so its usefulness is limited. There is a Minecraft mod for it, and games at PAX like Sucronomicon were developing with Omara technology. Between the limited game library and the price point ($500 full retail but half price for early backers), Omara looks to me like a very fun add-on but also a risk.

Notable Games

Toroban

There was more excitement and positive energy at the booth for Toroban than literally any other game booth that I visited. While sokoban-style games aren’t usually my preferred puzzle game, the laughter from this booth drew me in. Toroban was an “infinitely wrapping puzzle game” that played with block pushing on a screen without a border. Stages were sometimes solved by looping blocks around the dynamic screen. The demo showed off the overworld and as many stages and biomes as I could experience in about 20 minutes. Each biome introduced different mechanics that slowly ramped up the difficulty while remaining fun. Toroban is available on Steam right now.

We Were Here Tomorrow

Total Mayhem Games had a booth displaying the newest entry into their We Were Here franchise (review): the futuristic looking We Were Here Tomorrow. We Were Here games are asymmetrical co-op puzzle solving games designed as communication challenges. Players are challenged to use effective communication skills in order to work together and solve a series of challenging puzzles. We Were Here Tomorrow dropped players in a mysterious facility and they needed to work together to figure out what they were even doing there in the first place. I did not actually play the demo; I’m spoiler-averse and based on how good other games in the series have been, I knew that I would be playing the full game when it releases. Hopefully the wait isn’t too long. We Were Here Tomorrow is scheduled to release in 2026.

Reclaim! Azhe-giiwewining

Reclaim! Azhe-giiwewining was a point-and-click puzzle adventure game from Grassroots Indigenous Multimedia. Grassroots is a company dedicated to preserving and teaching the Ojibwe language, and Reclaim! is their flagship mass-marked product. It followed Miskwaa, an Ojibwe girl in modern times who got lost in the woods. In trying to find her way back, she encountered animals and spirits connected to Ojibwe culture and brushed up on her Ojibwemowin (the Ojibwe language). The demo was short and simple but enjoyable, and only just scratched the surface of a game that promised to delve into issues surrounding tradition v. modernity. Reclaim! is currently available on Steam.

The Video Game Lifestyle

PAX events are centered around the games, but they’ve never been just about the games. Booths upon booths each year have been dedicated to the lifestyle as well. From my observation, this year felt particularly keyed into supporting video gaming as a choice of lifestyle, aesthetic, and home decor. I counted about a dozen stalls at which you could purchase furniture, jewelry, handmade clothing and accessories, candles, coffee and tea, and many more lifestyle items with a nerdy focus. To name a few:

• Wyrmwood has been a constant at every PAX event I have attended, displaying their gorgeous tabletop gaming centered tables
• Tea and coffee were represented by D&Tea, Many Worlds Tavern, and The Gilded Teafling
• There were clothing and accessories from Moss Fête and Misty Mountain Gaming
• Strange and alluring scents were provided in candle form by Item Get and Dragon’s Den Candles
• A nearly infinite number of pins, stickers, art prints, and other decorations

Colleges and universities were present to further the nerdy lifestyle in a more professional way. Each was recruiting for their game-focused program. Universities such as Fitchburg State, Lesley, and Quinnipiac had students and professors present to show off games and other projects they had made. Over the years more and more academic institutions have been at PAX, and it has been great to see more and more programs opening up, training the game designers of tomorrow.

Tips for Visiting

• Walk around the convention center and explore the whole space. There are plenty of side rooms away from the main expo hall with interesting things going on.
• Utilize the tabletop library. There are hundreds and hundreds of games there to rent out for free.
• Parking is available but there’s usually a long line of traffic heading in. Public transportation to the convention center is bus only as there are no T stops closer than a 10 minute walk away.
• There are a few extremely local hotels that sell out fast so make your plans early.
• PAX East 2027 is scheduled for April 22-25, 2027. See you there!

Disclosure: PAX East provided a media pass.