We all want to be loved the way Strange Jigsaws loves a puzzle. There’s a joie de vivre in Strange Jigsaws that’s absolutely contagious. It combines humor with head-scratchers, weaving together puzzles of all shapes and sizes into a universe of lateral-thinking puzzles using jigsaws as a base.
Strange Jigsaws presents as a series of puzzle rooms with overlapping elements you need to untangle as you make your way through its ever-expanding “world” of jigsaws. The game opens with a three-sentence mission for you: “Solve Jigsaws. Find Golden Pieces. Open the door.” It then proceeds to present you with a bewildering tableau of dozens of puzzle elements, including a computer screen, an oversized icecube, some kind of magnetic contraption, and a mysterious door labeled: Door to the “Jigsawverse.” As you’ll soon find out, each of these starting puzzles unfurl into many more mazes of enigmas to unpack.
The best puzzles make you constantly rethink the rules of the world:
- Is a rubber chicken really “pulley”?
- How can I get this stamp from the top of my DS to the bottom of my DS?
- Is this Frog game even about fractions at all!?
The game’s developer — and puzzle aficionado — Fleb loves to make you question exactly what you’re looking at over and over. Strange Jigsaws takes the simple premise of rotating shapes and cutouts to reassemble something, let’s just say a picture (for now), and turns it into a small universe of clever puzzles, gags, and sheer joy.
But you can set any baggage you have about jigsaw puzzles aside, because Strange Jigsaws doesn’t play out exclusively as a series of pictures you need to unscramble and restore. Strange Jigsaws reveres modern era puzzles games like The Witness or its parody counterpart The Looker, both of which also take exceedingly simple mechanics and twist them in creative ways. It’s by using this approachable design language that Strange Jigsaws is able to chop, twist, and screw the definition of “jigsaws” into increasingly elaborate takes on the concept of a jigsaw puzzle.
Strange Jigsaws’ playful design and comedic chops are its biggest strength (which is good, since it has to compete with the 250-year legacy of every jigsaw puzzle ever created, not to mention every video game that’s cribbed from them since). Without giving any solutions away, this extends to novel puzzle framings like a computer interface that turns a captcha UI into a series of clever rotating elements, an anvil that needs to be reassembled (but is as gravity-challenged as any good Acme-cartoon killer oughta be), and a classic jigsaw with pieces from another set that need to be painted over and proudly declares “close enough” when you put the final touches in place.
It’s such a consistently funny game that half the reward is seeing how it will subvert your expectations from one vignette to the next, threading the needle between gentle absurdity of a WarioWare and the chaotic wordplay of Jazzpunk or Airplane! But make no mistake, Strange Jigsaws never feels weird or quirky for the meme of it all, it consistently feels like it’s laughing at its own jokes because Fleb (and by extension the game itself) thinks every joke is funny — and so do I. It’s not every day you get a play a game that wants to make sure you’re learning something you’ll use in your everyday life, like how the rounded tab on a jigsaw is called an “interjamb” and the indentation is a called a “blank.”
Setting aside all the game’s impressive design, and many goofs, what really stuck with me about Strange Jigsaws is how vividly its voice and personality just leaps off the page (or screen, in this case). It’s a game that’s both silly and warm, and simultaneously incredibly precise with just about every interaction. The game’s got vision! And you can feel its creator behind every interaction. There are lots of wonderful games where you can feel the author behind the code, design, or even combat, but Strange Jigsaws manages to draw a complete personality for itself without any strict kind of narrative or script, and inside a cool two- to three-hour runtime. It’s an impressive feat in the place you’d least suspect, and it’s a joy to go through it for yourself. Jigsaw puzzles are serious business after all.
