I'm giving a talk at ThinkyCon

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

Comments: (live)

Tagged: zarf, thinkycon, hadean lands, puzzles, talks

I'm on the schedule for ThinkyCon 2025!

Towers of Pen: puzzle experiences that zoom out and out

  • Me!
  • Thursday, November 6th
  • 4:00 - 4:30 pm (Eastern time)

What does it mean to take a puzzle to the next level? In Hadean Lands (parser IF, 2014) I designed a game where every solved puzzle "collapses" to become a single move in a larger puzzle. And larger still, and so on... Other games have taken a similar tack, notably Baba Is You.

What does it mean for a game to "scale up" in this way? Is it different from the familiar concept of the metapuzzle? (Spoiler: yes.) What kinds of puzzles are amenable to this scaling idea? And why is it so awesome, anyway?

ThinkyCon is a free online three-day event for and by puzzle game developers. There's lots of other great speakers, including FLEB, Patrick Traynor, and Tonda Ros. I hope you can drop in.

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