• Estigma [Steam Edition]
  

  26 minutes playtime

  14 of 19 achievements

Top down action. You can’t attack, and the goal is to use your unit-based movement to touch all the ground tiles without doubling back too much (since touching them a second time turns them into wall tiles), but the puzzle elements here are very light. The thing you’ll be worrying about most is avoiding enemies and hazards.

The game is fairly well designed. Projectiles launched into the air (towards the camera) can obscure the arena a bit too much sometimes, and other things exist solely to block your vision for a moment, but I never had an issue figuring out how I was supposed to avoid something. The only time I was caught off guard was level 3, where you’re chased by an unkillable enemy in one of only two levels that scroll (all others consist of single-screen rooms), but then it turns out you still have to cover each tile like before and there’s just barely not enough time to double back if you don’t realize that at first.

Still, my only major issue is that, if you do get stuck between walls of your own making, there’s no quick reset; you either have to escape and start the whole level over (which consists of multiple rooms), or you wait for the timer to run out. There’s really no reason each screen couldn’t be its own level, although having a checkpoint between each room works okay enough for the most part. Also, I wasn’t fond of how level 10 and the rest of the postgame shifted genres to be a riddle-based ARG that just ends with an ad for another game, but you can always just stop after level 9.

Plus, it’s free, so check it out.