Welcome to Puzzle Lovers!

Ten years ago today, on August 9, 2016, the Puzzle Lovers group was created. I wasn't there for it, so a good chunk of this anniversary is other people's history, not mine. But a decade is a decade, and it would be strange to let it pass without saying anything.

Credit where it's due: Hippyshake founded the group in 2016, and it was maintained by Dohi64 for the longest stretch of its life. Whatever else has changed, the basic principle has been there from the start and hasn't moved: honest reviews, written by people who actually played the games.

It's worth remembering what Steam looked like in 2016. A few thousand games came out that year, Greenlight was still limping along, and a curator could plausibly keep an eye on most of what mattered in a genre. Now there are more than 20 000 releases a year, and nobody can keep up with all of it. That's the single biggest change of the decade, and it's why groups like this still have a reason to exist. Discoverability got worse, not better, and puzzle games, a small genre with small marketing budgets and no streamer-friendly explosions, got hit hardest. A genuinely great puzzle game can come out and sell a few hundred copies, not because it's bad, but because nobody ever saw it.

Everything else changed too, of course. The indie scene grew enormously and got much more talented, but it also filled up with asset flips, clicker games, and now AI-generated everything. Scammers and fake reviews arrived along with everyone else. And through all of it, the small stubborn corner of people who'd rather pause and think than run and shoot kept showing up. In ten years, the group steadily grew. There are close to six thousand group members, and more than seven thousand curator followers. We've written close to two thousand reviews. Brainrack has gone out almost every week for the past seven years and is up to issue #366. There have been weekly giveaways, a playtesting offer for developers, a functionality and accessibility guide that is often referenced and shared, and a Community Corner where people post things they made. The other change I'm glad about: this stopped being a one-person show. There are around a bunch of more or less active people on the curator team now. Azzurra has been here longer than I have and is still at it, which over ten years counts for a lot more than any single big contribution. Tanner has taken over group communication recently and does it better than I was managing to. That kind of arrangement is much healthier than one person quietly burning out, and it means the group survives any one of us losing interest, which, over ten years, has already happened more than once.

Which brings me to the part I owe you. The newsletter hasn't gone out for the past few months. The honest reason is that a very busy stretch at work ran into a fair amount of gaming burnout, and Brainrack was the thing that gave way. I should have said so at the time instead of letting it just quietly stop. It's coming back shortly, I'm not winding anything down, I just needed to step back from it for a while.

Beyond that, the plan is the boring one that's been working for ten years: keep curating, keep publishing the newsletter, keep giving developers honest feedback whether or not they want to hear it, keep looking for good reviewers and playtesters to bring onto the team.

None of it works without the people reading this. Thank you. Ten years of a niche community holding together on the internet is not a small thing.

As always, please comment with any feedback, positive or negative, about the group and the curators.

Thanks for ten years of support. Here's to the next ten.