I played nothing but puzzle games for a month

For an experiment I limited myself to puzzle games for a month. By week two I understood why we try to vary the catalogue here.

Good puzzle design has a rhythm: teach, test, twist. The games that lasted me the longest spaced out their new ideas instead of dumping everything in the tutorial.

The ones that burned me out did the opposite — same mechanic, harder numbers, over and over. Difficulty is not the same as depth, and I felt the difference in my thumbs by the end.

The surprise lesson was that casual puzzlers mixed with the odd hard one aged better than a pure stream of brutal brain-teasers. Legends of Slots actually survived the whole month precisely because it's low-stakes.

If you binge puzzles, alternate easy and hard. Your brain needs the recovery levels more than you'd guess.