Thinking Games 2

You've got a collection of puzzles that was supposedly supposed to get your brain spinning back in 1993 — and you know what, it kind of works. Thinking Games 2 is a collection of logic puzzles that doesn't care about who made it or what exact genre it represents. There are just riddles here, and you've got to solve them.

What you'll find in the menu are various types of thinking games — from jigsaws to logic chains to abstract tasks. The game presents you with a puzzle, and you've got to find the answer. Sometimes it's obvious right away, sometimes it takes a while. The graphics are spartan, like you're staring at an old school computer that only had energy left for essential pixels. Black and white or monochrome aesthetics reign everywhere, with a splash of color here and there, but mostly by accident.

It plays simply — you click, you drag, you type a number, you confirm. The controls are straightforward, so frustration doesn't come from a rubber gamepad, but from your own brain telling you it's kind of seeing it, but something's off. Procedural elegance alternates with exercises that seem to have been designed on the basis of "what could possibly annoy us". Sometimes it works, sometimes you feel like the puzzle was cooked up on Friday afternoon before a long weekend.

This is what education and entertainment looked like before someone decided to handle it with a nice GUI. Collections like this had their value — they were an alternative to forgetful games and eye candy. Today we mostly take it as an artifact from an era when people thought a nice logical puzzle and no unnecessary sound was enough for you.

Want to try how educational software did when it had no budget for animations? Thinking Games 2 is exactly it. In your browser it'll keep you entertained for about ten minutes, then you'll go back to something less spartan. But you'll remember that puzzles don't need to be colorful to have substance.