Quick Reviews: Logic Games

Like a moth to the flame, I've been drawn back to more small games that are centered on logic, including circuitry, more nonograms, and some other deductive games. So this time I'm puzzling my way through Turing Complete, Mosaic of the Strange, Strange Antiquities, and Confidential Killings.

Turing Complete

Turing Complete is still in Early Access even though it came out in 2021, but it falls into a type of game that I find myself weirdly drawn into, which are games that are centered around computing or programming. In this case, it's focused on circuitry in particular, and I've talked about Shenzhen I/O before, so it's not the fist game that I've checked out that goes all-in on that. And they're both decently challenging despite having taken classes about circuitry at the college level (a while ago).

There's two relatively loose narratives here. The first is something about being tested by aliens, and the second is the gameplay premise that this starts with the most basic logic gates, and subsequent levels are more and more advanced functions built with the existing chips that have been created. This really is the sort of thing that is driven by the second part of this, though, and just having to figure out how to accomplish each of the goals along the way.

If there was one big criticism to this, though, it has a really steep learning curve, and if you can't figure it out, you're just not getting past parts of this. It's some big leaps, and I feel like a lot of this turns into just staring at the screen and hoping something clicks. I wonder if this would go a little bit better if there was something like a bit of a limitation on components - on one hand, that would make this a bit less open-ended but on the other hand a reasonable constraint might really help give a bit of direction about how to approach a problem. For example, I got to one of the early, elegant solutions by realizing there was an achievement.

Turning Complete is a nice thing to come back to, for me, but it's not exactly a game I'd recommend to most people - there's a lot more games that tackle programming that I'd recommend before getting this into the circuitry.

Mosaic of the Strange

I've gone on about nonograms quite a bit, both on the podcast in our episode covering Picross and Mario's Picross and in a previous review. And I've also talked quite highly about Minesweeper. So a game that combines both, like this 2025 game from Mark Ffrench, and then throws in a bunch of text entries about a whole bunch of weird, mysterious, paranormal, and conspiratorial events was right up my alley.

Rather than the gameplay of nonograms that use gridded clues (so, clues just along rows and columns), here you're given numbers in much the same way that Minesweeper gives numbers, where the number is how many light squares there are in a 3x3 grid, much the same way that a number in minesweeper is how many mines. Though here the number can be one of them as well. I really like this as a twist on gameplay, although a big criticism of Mosaic of the Strange is that I played this on controller and there was an incredibly frustrating bug causing the controls to jump to the lower left. To its credit, it doesn't really punish for misclicks or using hints, so the errors this caused were annoying but not as frustrating as it would've been if I was losing time or points or achievements. 

Completing each picture provides a dossier on something strange or unusual, and if you're the sort of person that easily ends up going down rabbit holes on Wikipedia about the paranormal, this is great. You don't really have to read them, but I read every one of them and also had fun trying to guess, as I played, what the article was going to be about when I finished. I'm pretty sure I called the Philadelphia Experiment, for example. There is also a storyline in here that I was digging as well, because it just keeps pulling in more aspects of the paranormal and conspiratorial, and I really find that fun, on top of the gameplay.

The most frustrating part of this game for me, though, was the ending. It doesn't ruin anything I'd consider a surprise, but finishing the game requires having to complete a couple puzzles when it's timed, and I just don't like that approach to begin with; I always prefer picross that doesn't have a timer and is more just about working through the logic. So even under the best of circumstances, I'd be a touch annoyed, but the issues that this had with the controller went from annoying to really frustrating.

For me, it meant this game ended on a more sour note than I'd have liked, even though I devoured this game, putting in just over 40 hours to 100% it.

Strange Antiquities

Strange Antiquities is the second game from Bad Viking to show up on Steam, releasing in 2025 just a few years after a very similar game that I also played, Strange Horticulture from 2022. Both fall into 'cozy game' territory but with a creepy or ominous veneer to them. The central gameplay is the same in both cases, you run a store full of somewhat occult or mysterious items and you have to identify what they ae using observations, deductions, and reference materials as customers come in each day. In principle, I'm all for that, though in Strange Horticulture, I remember it starting to feel a bit samey since it's all plants, so when I played that I beat it but didn't 100% it (though I may go back now).

Strange Antiquities, on the other hand, has a much more fun variety of objects, simply because now it's all manner of artifacts. It still involves a lot of deduction, but the objects feel a lot more distinct and memorable, on the whole. This one also felt like it had a much stronger Lovecraftian storyline than I remember Strange Horticulture having, which I think is part of what pushed me to go back and complete this game fully in a way that I didn't do at the time with Strange Horticulture (which, don't get me wrong, I still did like).

I do think that this, like Strange Horticulture, ends up in the same sort of corner where it goes past what I thought of as a sweet spot of deduction and reference materials and adds too many variables to try to use in deductions. I really like the "aha, I can cross-reference this" moments, but I'm a lot less a fan of "there's a special extra kind of vision that creates a new set of hoops to jump through". Still, even with that making this a tad more frustrating later on, the narrative really approaches an interesting climax and the extra puzzles along the way are sometimes super satisfying to figure out. So the game keeps me very engaged the whole way through, and I put in about 8 hours to 100% the whole game (which includes a satisfying epilogue designed to let you fill in all the gaps in the book - it's like if after beating the Elite Four and your rival in Pokemon, you then went on a walk that would take you past all the Pokemon you hadn't had the chance to encounter yet so that you can complete your Pokedex).

Confidential Killings

Set in 70s Los Angeles, this game from BRANE was released on Steam in January 2026, where you are a detective solving a series of deaths. With how much I do like LA and Hollywood, I'll admit that I went into this hoping to see a lot of Los Angeles captured in this, sort of like part of what drew me to L.A. Noir where I could drive around without using the game guidance at points because it recreated the streets of Hollywood.

Slightly to my disappointment, this feels like Hollywood just through the lens of film and tabloids. Still, you can't go wrong with a Sunset Blvd allusion and even though this doesn't quite feel like LA as a place all that often for me, I do like the narrative this creates and the shadowy Ad Astra organization that is co-opting celebrities to help grow their sinister reach, in a way that I can't possibly compare to any existing organizations in Hollywood.

Each scene involves exploring one or multiple rooms, looking for items to interact with, and then finding all the 'clues', here just really meaning all the underlined words. Sometimes it's situations that make sense, like finding a letter written to the deceased that uses names, or things like ID cards, labels, and scripts. But too often it feels like prose that's been written just to harvest words for another purpose, or having to find the right spot to get someone's name because it shows up multiple places and you can only grab it if it's underlined. It ends up feeling really arbitrary.

This all goes into some very cumbersome reconstructions of crimes. There is a whole page (sometimes two) of everyone present at a crime, and to its credit, it'll mark them green every time you get them right, but I really thing for the identification pages once a name is used correctly it should be removed from the pulldown. It just gets unmanageable otherwise when there's so many names. And then the reconstruction itself requires getting everything in one go, and with how wordy these end up, there's something fairly annoying about that as well in a way that it wouldn't be if it would do something like mark off paragraphs individually.

The game can be completed in roughly 3-4 hours without stressing too much about it and I feel like I took my time and read everything rathe than just look for underlined words.

Recap

Turing Complete scratches a very niche itch for me, but there's only a few people I know that feel like the sort of person I'd recommend this to. Already tough, it feels like it would be incredibly difficult for someone unfamiliar with the topic to jump into. Turing Complete is available on Steam.

Mosaic of the Strange feels like a very fun way to combine picross and minesweeper, and that plus the paranormal aspects put this right up my alley. The way this played with a controller left something to be desired, but that won't stop me from checking out more from Mark Frrench (there's at least two more with this gameplay loop). Mosaic of the Strange is available on Steam.

Strange Antiquities has fun gameplay, atmosphere, and story at the intersection of creepy and cozy that makes it well worth playing, and I think it can be played without checking out Strange Horticulture first, if desired. Strange Antiquities is available on Steam, and the Nintendo Switch (though it might benefit from playing with a keyboard).

Confidential Killings has a really interesting storyline, but I do find parts of the gameplay to be a bit too clunky. I'd recommend someone start off with some other similar games like The Duck Detective first, but if you enjoy the game type and need more, then Confidential Killings can raise to that challenge pretty well and has some interesting world building elements that kept me coming back, though I'd like to see a couple quality of life improvements to it. Confidential Killings is available on Steam.