1. Fields of Mistria: early access harvest moon-like, the only remotely normal gamer fare on this list

2. Voxelgram: picross but in 3D

3. Tametsi: puzl

4. Coloring Pixels: literally just color by the numbers one little square at a time

5. Riven: the sequel to Myst, an actual game but I only played it for three hours for Suffering Sunday once and then never got around to going back to it

that sounds about as long as I played Riven when it first came out

6. Placid Plastic Duck Simulator: literally just fired this up one day this year just to have Something happening on my second monitor while I did tags

7. Doronko Wanko: my computer could open the game but it lagged so hard it was completely unplayable. but I opened it, so it's on the year in review

cacopheny: I played Myst for the first time last year and enjoyed it enough to play it to completion, so in theory I should be able to get into Riven, it's just turned into a stars-aren't-in-alignment kind of thing

point and click puzzlers are honestly near and dear to my heart as they were big in my household growing up, but we never had Myst/Riven because my mom is deaf and there are so many sound-based puzzles in them

I was very bad at Myst but I thought it was so pretty I tried Riven. I got stuck in the marsh huts place and couldn't figure out where to go, so I just dropped it of course I was like 15 at the time

I have the books based on the games and those are in fact fun

Myst and Riven were insanely graphically impressive for the time but yeah, the puzzles are... even "obtuse" doesn't feel like the right word. it's a lot of clicking on random things with no idea what you're doing until eventually you piece together how things piece together

experimental rather than intuitive

it's interesting, but it's hard to get into