We introduce PuzzleJAX, a GPU-accelerated puzzle game engine and description language designed to support rapid benchmarking of tree search, reinforcement learning, and LLM reasoning abilities. Unlike existing GPU-accelerated learning environments that provide hard-coded implementations of fixed sets of games, PuzzleJAX allows dynamic compilation of any game expressible in its domain-specific language (DSL). This DSL follows PuzzleScript, which is a popular and accessible online game engine for designing puzzle games. In this paper, we validate in PuzzleJAX several hundred of the thousands of games designed in PuzzleScript by both professional designers and casual creators since its release in 2013, thereby demonstrating PuzzleJAX's coverage of an expansive, expressive, and human-relevant space of tasks. By analyzing the performance of search, learning, and language models on these games, we show that PuzzleJAX can naturally express tasks that are both simple and intuitive to understand, yet often deeply challenging to master, requiring a combination of control, planning, and high-level insight.

I've always had an interest in programming, because I've always had an interest in computers. I put together websites in HTML as a teenager (which, yes, were hosted on GeoCities) and have been occasionally dabbling in Python since. Yet none of my projects got very far and, apart from my early websites, I never made anything useful. My efforts all followed a familiar pattern: I'd fixate on a particular resource--like an O'Reilly book or an online course--and get started with great enthusiasm, but as I'd realize I was months or years away from creating anything remotely useful, I'd give up. That changed in late 2024 when my general frustration with WordPress, which I was using for my personal website, got the better of me. In a fit, I threw my website's content plus a screenshot of it into Claude 3.5 Sonnet and asked the AI to replicate my site with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

PS4/5, Xbox, PC, Nintendo Switch Taiwanese studio Red Candle Games broke through in 2019 with the first-person horror game, Devotion. Its follow-up, Nine Sols, is less grungy but no less distinct, a robust 2D action-platformer with an exquisite "taopunk" aesthetic. This vivid sci-fi world feels as if it is constructed as much from bamboo and jade as steel and microchips. Alongside absorbing exploration and blistering combat, you study and grow various strains of alien flora found aboard a labyrinthine spaceship. The ultimate goal is escape, but you may never actually want to leave the strange, bioluminescent garden you come to cultivate.

The latest Day of the Devs showcase has come and gone, but the stream placed a spotlight on a whole bunch of promising indie games. The event is curated by Double Fine and iam8bit and this digital showcase highlighted dozens of in-progress titles to keep an eye on. The virtual show included some world premieres and release date announcements, along with a bunch of new trailers about games we already knew about. These are all vastly different titles, with their own publishers, genres, budgets and visual styles. They have just one thing in common.

By 2004, video games were well into their adolescence. The war between Sega and Nintendo that defined the early 1990s was in the rear-view mirror – the PlayStation had knocked both of them off their perch, and Microsoft had released the Xbox. The critical and commercial hits of the day were not cartoon platformers but operatic space shooters (Halo) and anarchic crime games (Grand Theft Auto). There were lots of guns, and most games were embracing increasingly cinematic cutscenes. Nintendo, meanwhile, had fallen into third place with its Game Cube home console – but it still owned the handheld game market with the Game Boy Advance.

Difficulty is one of the key drivers of player engagement and it is often one of the aspects that designers tweak most to optimise the player experience; operationalising it is, therefore, a crucial task for game development studios. A common practice consists of creating metrics out of data collected by player interactions with the content; however, this allows for estimation only after the content is released and does not consider the characteristics of potential future players. In this article, we present a number of potential solutions for the estimation of difficulty under such conditions, and we showcase the results of a comparative study intended to understand which method and which types of data perform better in different scenarios. The results reveal that models trained on a combination of cohort statistics and simulated data produce the most accurate estimations of difficulty in all scenarios. Furthermore, among these models, artificial neural networks show the most consistent results.

PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PC A game about the importance of cooking and the immigrant experience, in which we see vignettes of the daily life of a family who have emigrated from India to Canada. The mother uses food to keep herself and her son connected to their homeland and as a distance grows, perhaps inevitably, between parent and child, we see the consequences. The Tamil language, film, music and cuisine are depicted here with affection, lending emotional weight to the story. PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC As a traveller in foreign lands, with no knowledge of the local languages, you must piece clues together from context, making this part puzzle game and part adventure game. The beautiful, minimalist art is reminiscent of Monument Valley and the contrasting colour palette creates a sense of otherworldliness.

The gaming year used to follow a predictable rhythm: we'd have a flurry of announcements in the summer, around the gaming trade event E3, then a rush of releases between September and the end of November – and then absolutely nothing would happen until March at the earliest. But now E3 is gone for good, and the Game Awards – the industry's most glamorous and also most intensely commercial awards show – takes place in early December, so we suddenly have an eye-watering number of new trailers and debuts right as we're all preparing to hibernate. I didn't watch this year's show live (it started at 12.30am UK time last Saturday morning and was over three hours long) and I'm betting that most of you didn't watch it either, so here are the headlines: Baldur's Gate 3 won nearly everything; as ever the awards felt like something that had to be squeezed in around all the trailers; there was not very much time given to developers to speak, which rankled; The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Spider-Man 2 were snubbed in several categories (Zelda won best action adventure game, Spider-Man won nothing). In the interest of giving games and developers appropriate airtime, then, instead of going over the merits and problems of the Game Awards again, here are some of the announcements that stood out. If you're into unsettling vibes, ghost stories about haunted arcade machines, and having your expectations put into a blender and served back to you as a milkshake, Daniel Mullins' games should be on your radar.

This paper focuses on procedurally generating rules and communicating them to players to adjust the difficulty. This is part of a larger project to collect and adapt games in educational games for young children using a digital puzzle game designed for kindergarten. A genetic algorithm is used together with a difficulty measure to find a target number of solution sets and a large language model is used to communicate the rules in a narrative context. During testing the approach was able to find rules that approximate any given target difficulty within two dozen generations on average. The approach was combined with a large language model to create a narrative puzzle game where players have to host a dinner for animals that can't get along. Future experiments will try to improve evaluation, specialize the language model on children's literature, and collect multi-modal data from players to guide adaptation.

In recent years, we've seen an influx of self-proclaimed "cozy games," video games explicitly designed to invoke good vibes. To help those who could use some help winding down, we've rounded up a selection of games that purposefully deemphasize fail states, violence, overwhelming grinds, intense competition and other aggressive urges, but aren't overly cute for the sake of it or so stripped-down that they're boring. This open-ended sim has you fix up a dilapidated farm and interact with nearby townsfolk. Apart from being one of our favorite couch co-op games, the farming life sim Stardew Valley is also notable for its relaxing qualities. It's a game that's willing to meet you at your pace: If you want to putter around your farm, casually chat up townsfolk, brew beer or fish for a few hours, you can.