Zarf Updates

Recent puzzle fun.

• Cipher Zero
• Coupling
• Monument Valley 3

(See also Occlude from a couple of weeks ago.)

Cipher Zero

• by Zapdot -- game site

A Witness-like which starts out in nonogram (paint-by-number) territory and then gets more complicated. Very complicated. The glyph rules are pretty easy to grasp, but the permutations of fulfilling them on a board can be ferocious.

This has a lovely poly-painted aesthetic and an even better hand-feel. Everything slides and moves and bounces with satisfying ssh-click! noises. However, it lacks the explorable frame-world of Witness and Taiji. As far as I can tell it lacks the world-level secret goals and surprises as well. It's just a steady firehose of puzzles. I'm feeling worn down (middle of chapter 3-out-of-5) and I'm ready to put the game aside.

Coupling

• by xyz -- game site

Minimalist puzzler where world elements move based on your movement. That's a fairly well-explored puzzle-platformer gimmick; Coupling jazzes it up by putting you in nonlinear space (think Antichamber or Manifold Garden). Portals, looping plummets, all the fun stuff.

This is imaginative and clever, but it requires precision footwork as well as brainwork. I bogged down on one tediously fussy shuffle-dance over a pit -- I succeeded once, then screwed up the next stage and had to repeat the shuffle, and then something else went wrong and I needed to start the whole level from scratch? Maybe? I lost interest, anyhow.

If you try it, I recommend checking all the settings and control info. There's some "snap facing to grid" buttons which make the fussy parts considerably less annoying. Also you can tweak the dead zone on your controller sticks, which I found absolutely critical.

Monument Valley 3

• by ustwo games -- game site

Oy, the Monument Valley games. I always enjoy them but they seem so inconsequential once I'm finished.

No, let's talk about Netflix. Netflix leaped into the gaming arena in 2021. Quality mobile games free with your Netflix subscription! Plus they acquired studios like Night School (Oxenfree) and Spry Fox (Cozy Grove). Indie hits like Hades and Rise of the Golden Idol got hauled in as Netflix exclusives -- on mobile at least.

Great for the developers. Not great for me; I don't have a Netflix subscription. But I mostly game on PC so whatever, right? Games arrived on Steam, I played them on Steam... except for Monument Valley 3, which launched last December as a 100% Netflix exclusive.

Well, that didn't last. Surprise! Netflix seems to have decided that throwing buckets of money at talent isn't nearly as good a deal as farming a few reliably addictive titles. Pretty much the same thing that happened to Apple Arcade. Netflix was just a couple of years behind the curve. So now Netflix is closing studios and delisting games. (With little notice to developers, according to The Verge.)

And now MV3 has disappeared from mobile. It's on Steam now, though, so... no, that doesn't make it all worthwhile. Not remotely. Netflix's whiplash for developers isn't the worst game-industry news of 2025, but it sure doesn't help. What will happen to Night School, dammit?

I hope MV3 will make it back to mobile soon. Yes, it's playable with a mouse (and I did) -- but the series was born on touchscreen and lives its best life there.

Good game though. MV2 felt like a retread of the original, but MV3 expands its reach. Many new visual twists and interaction ideas. The puzzles are a bit deeper, too. It's still not a thinky puzzle game, but you have to manage more state and pay attention to more things.

As for the story -- just enough for a platformer, as usual. Geez, there was a brief rumor of an MV movie adaptation, wasn't there? Talk about starting from scratch. Instead we got a five-minute animated short, which is legit and lovely but definitely follows the tradition of "tiny wordless anecdote".

I'll keep playing Monuments as long as the series continues. The question is, are they selling well enough to justify the (long, apparently high-effort) development cycle? Ustwo's fling with Netflix, unsatisfying as it was, seems to imply the answer is "no".